Chinese men greatly outnumbered Chinese women in the U.S. during the decades before World War II. In 1940, the ratio of Chinese men to women in New York City was six to one. After World War II, following passage of the 1945 War Brides Act and related legislation, Chinese immigrant women entered the U.S. in substantial numbers.

By 1960, there were about 12,173 ethnic Chinese women living in New York City. The women represented about 37 percent of the total Chinese population in New York City. Immigration of both men and women from China increased tremendously after the 1968 implementation of the 1965 Immigration Act which ended the racially-defined quota system.

In New York City, there were an estimated 31,820 ethnic Chinese women in 1970 and 60,354 in 1980. Immigrant Chinese women provided a ready supply of affordable labor. This labor supply combined with low rental costs and vacant industrial space in and near Chinatown brought many garment shops to the area during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The number of Chinese-owned unionized garment shops increased from 34 in 1965 to 247 in 1975. By 1979, 60 percent of Chinatown families and 40 percent of Chinese families living in New York City earned some of their income from work in the Chinatown garment industry.

During the 1980s and 1990s, competition from cheaper foreign imports, higher rental and operating costs in Chinatown, and the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 (NAFTA) led to the relocation of the local garment industry from Chinatown to Flushing, Queens, to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and to quasi-extra-territorial mandatory zones. 1

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1See Xiaolan Bao, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).