In 1876, the U.S. Congress established a Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration. It held hearings in San Francisco, interviewing workers and business owners. One of those who testified was Anna Ferry Smith, who described herself as “a general working woman.” Smith, like Frank Roney, had arrived in San Francisco in 1875.

Born in New York in 1833, Smith went to work while still a child in domestic service. Moving slowly west, she worked in a succession of jobs and industries: in a shoe factory, as a janitor in girls’ schools, as a nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War, as a washerwoman, and ironing in laundries. She married a disabled war veteran, who was fired from his job with the Pennsylvania Railroad because of his disability. He died in Missouri. Anna with his child went to Denver.

Although she never received any formal education, part of her compensation while employed as a janitor was permission to attend classes. Apparently she did so and became an enthusiastic reader.

In California, at first she cooked and kept house on ranches. At last she arrived in San Francisco, putting a roof over her head as a seamstress, broken up by periods of unemployment. Her young son worked more than she did.

Smith was reported in a San Francisco newspaper as “well informed on matters connected with the labor question.” Her testimony on Chinese immigration before the congressional committee backed up that opinion; the transcripts show her to be intelligent, articulate, and able to hold her own in exchanges with U.S. senators. When one senator tried to get her to say that Chinese workers were the cause of the wretched condition of working women in San Francisco, she responded with a question of her own. She politely inquired as to “why the condition of the working people in the East, where there are no Chinamen, is worse than it is here?”