Perhaps you would benefit by considering the work of Sue Fawn Chung, recently retired from the history department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Dr. Chung has done wonderful work on the history of Chinese immigration, with special consideration given to the plight of Chinese American women. She wrote an eloquent, insightful chapter for Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community which I helped to edit, published in 1998.

Sue Fawn Chung demonstrated in a clear way that much of the way Chinese women were viewed - in the nineteenth century as well as in subsequent historiography - was affected by prejudice. Many people regarded these immigrant women as prostitutes, whether or not they were involved in sexual commerce. Since many were second or third wives - leaving the primary wife in China to care for parents and children - enumerators frequently regarded the immigrants as concubines and therefore as prostitutes.

Subsequent historians - notably Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (1981) - subsequently "over-corrected" nineteenth-century manuscript census reports by moving even more Chinese American women into the category of prostitute. The prejudice of nineteenth-century census enumerators was subsequently compounded by the misunderstandings of a twentieth-century historian.

This does not answer how stereotypes may have affected activism, etc., but it is a good place to start, and Dr. Chung's subsequent and extensive publications may lead to the comparative insight you seek. Good luck!