The Only Girl in Amoy: Gender and American Patriotism in a Nineteenth-Century Treaty Port

In 1861 twenty-year-old Ruth Bradford accompanied her father to the Chinese treaty port of Amoy where he was to serve as American consul. Bradford recorded this trip in a diary kept from her departure from New York until her 1863 return. Drawing upon her diary, this paper explores how Bradford, as the only American woman in Amoy, refined her sense-of-self through interracial and cross-cultural encounters with the settlement’s Chinese and British inhabitants. I argue that through critical comparison with these communities, Bradford, like other nineteenth-century American women in China, consolidated and articulated both a gendered, racial, and burgeoning patriotic national identity.