Women's/Feminist histories (in progress)
www.immigrant-voices.aiisf.org/stories-by-author/869-so-close-but-so-far/
- [1893-94] Jennie Sorabji "wintered" in San Francisco around 1893-1894, as she was traveling through the United States to raise money to build a women's hospital in Bombay. [Los Angeles Herald, Apr 23 1894, p 3, col 4, "Miss Sorabji Engaged"]
- [1900] Punjabi princesses Bamba Duleep Singh and Sophia Duleep Singh arrived by ship in San Francisco, on their way to the Paris Exposition. The princesses were interviewed in the San Francisco Call. The sisters were of mixed race; their father was Indian, while their mother was German and Ethopian. Sophia Duleep Singh later went on to become a prominent British suffragette, best known for her role in the Women's Tax Resistance League — a feminist Indian princess story!
- [1910] Approximately fourteen year old girl Kanta Chandra moves to the Bay Area from Delhi, to be with her elder brother, who had studied at UC Berkeley.
- [1916] High school student Kanta Chandra becomes the first South Asian woman to apply for US citizenship, indicating her race as "white" (she didn't receive citizenship until 1969)
- [1970s?] boona cheema starts at BOSS
- [1991 ★] Narika was founded in Berkeley
- [1993 ★] The UC Berkeley-based Women of South Asian Descent Collective publish the groundbreaking anthology Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora, featuring about 100 articles by 65 South Asian American authors with roots in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, and Afghanistan. The book came out of a 1991 class at UC Berkeley.
- [2000 ★] Lakireddy Bali Reddy's sex and labor trafficking led to the founding of ASATA, the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. This is best described in "Local and Global Divided: Transnational Exploitation against South Asian" by Sujatha Jesudason, chapter 17 of Body Evidence: Intimate Violence Against South Asian Women in America.
- [2003 ★] South Asian Sisters' Yoni Ki Baat project, a South Asian women's response inspired by the Vagina Monologues, launched. First show was at UC Berkeley in 2003. Many subsequent shows have been at the Women's Building.