The concept of going out of the home to work is certainly not new to Chinese women. Early Chinese women were found in a diversity of work situations of which prostitution, domestic servitude, paid domestic service, mining, rubber estate work, hawking and manufacturing were the first major forms. Other major work activities included personal servicing as cashiers, waitresses and cleaners in restaurants, hotels and bars, hairdressing in saloons, laundry work, construction work, and vegetable gardening and livestock rearing. In some of these work situations, Chinese women's skills and tradition of economic independence originating from their peasant and working class origins in southern China were continued and further developed in Malaya.

The subordinate position of Chinese women in colonial Malaya was largely the outcome of the dynamic interaction between gender and class relations in which they were both members of a class and a gender at the same time, the two being not mutually exclusive. As members of a class, they did not own the means of production and sold their labour power or their sexuality to ensure the conditions for their own and their families' maintenance and reproduction. At the same time, they entered the labour market or were sold and traded in a traffic in women as women in subordinate roles defined by gender relations, such as wives, mothers, mui tsai and prostitutes. Some of these gender roles were already in existence in China; in Malaya, they were intensified, decomposed and recomposed into new forms with a new basis and significance. Capital-labour relations such as in the mines and estates fed on these gender defined roles to subordinate women as dependants, supplementary, inferior or marginal workers. In other contexts such as in prostitution, gender relations were clearly dominant in determining women's position within the male-dominated mines and pioneer towns. State policies and ideologies further reinforced and structured women's position and options, particularly in the case of prostitutes and mui tsai.