The Washington Post-A Chinese immigrant led the fight for womens suffrage then couldnt vote

2024-02-29T20:58:12.775Z

On a sunny afternoon in May 1912, as the sun began to descend over the Washington Square arch in New York City, thousands of women gathered for a march.

Women of every age and background packed onto the sidewalks, with the oldest following the procession in carriages and the youngest being pushed in strollers by their mothers. Hundreds more people peered out of their windows upon the nurses, teachers, writers, social workers and students. “There were women who work with their heads and women who work with their hands and women who never work at all. And they all marched,” the New York Times reported the next day.

They were all there to demand the same thing: women’s suffrage.

At the head of the procession — which the Times called 10,000 strong — trotted a small brigade of women on horseback. Among those, wearing a dark hat pinned with the green, purple and white badge of the Women’s Political Union, rode Mabel Lee, a Chinese immigrant who was around 16. The only non-White horseback rider, the high school student helped lead what was at that time the biggest suffrage march in U.S. history.

Over the next decade, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee would fight tirelessly to advance women’s rights, advocating for the vote as the only path toward women’s equality. Despite her young age, Lee drew crowds for her speeches, and her public appearances were covered by the Times, the New York Tribune or the Sun. She was a major force behind the movement that won women the vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

But because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which made it illegal for Chinese immigrants to become American citizens or vote between 1882 and 1943, Lee herself would be prevented from voting for many decades.

Such was the fate of the many Black, Indigenous and Asian American women who fought to win the right to vote for everyone — and then were barred, often violently, from exercising those same rights. “We can talk about whether the right to vote was actually won for Chinese American women, or for African American women, or for Native women in 1920. Because — for the most part — it was not,” said Cathleen Cahill, historian and author of the book “Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement.”

“The story doesn’t end in 1920,” Cahill said.

Lee came to the United States when she was around 8 with her mother. They reunited with Lee’s father, who was already working in New York as a Baptist minister. Lee had begun learning English in China, and she subsequently learned enough Latin, English and math to graduate from the prestigious Erasmus High School. She entered Barnard College, soon after the suffrage parade.

While at Barnard, Lee continued her advocacy for women. Bathed in the campus atmosphere of first-wave feminism, she grew more impassioned in her many speeches and essays. She spoke to American women and Chinese women alike, recognizing that both nations were at turning points: China on the heels of a revolution, and the United States at a crossroads on progressive issues such as suffrage.

In a 1914 article in a student magazine, Lee, then about 18, wrote that women’s suffrage was simply the “application of democracy to women.” Sweeping away misconceptions that many men held and would hold about feminism for decades to come, she wrote: “The feministic movement is not one for privileges to women, but one for the requirement of women to be worthy citizens and contribute their share to the steady progress of our country towards prosperity and national greatness.”

Lee was a powerful orator whose speeches often drew enormous crowds. She was such a phenomenon that some people who heard her speak coined the term “Mabelize” to describe how they came away feeling mesmerized and inspired by her words, Cahill said.

Around 1915, in a widely publicized speech titled “The Submerged Half,” Lee argued that keeping women from voting “handicapped” a country. “For no nation can ever make real and lasting progress in civilization unless its women are following close to its men if not actually abreast with them,” she said. “In the fierce struggle for existence among the nations, that nation is badly handicapped which leaves undeveloped one half of its intellectual and moral resources.”

All the while, Lee had to contend with vicious stereotypes about Chinese people in general and Chinese women in particular. Even positive press coverage denigrated Lee. One article in the New York Tribune described her as a “hopeless little suffragette” from the “Chop Suey District.”

The reigning stereotype in the United States at the time was that women of Asian descent were either meek or sex workers. “There’s very little perception of Chinese women outside of those two stereotypes. And that goes back even before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act,” said Jeanne Gutierrez, a women’s history scholar at the New-York Historical Society.

White suffragists welcomed Lee into their movement, but racism persisted both inside and outside women’s organizations. It ranged from outright racism to a softer prejudice that argued suffrage should be for White women only to make it palatable to Southern men, Gutierrez noted.

Lee continued her activism alongside her education, eventually earning a PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1921. She is believed to be the first Chinese woman to be awarded a PhD in the United States and one of the first women of any background with a PhD in economics. She went on to write a book on economics.

In 1917, New York state granted women the right to vote. And in 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that right was extended on a national level. It would take another 23 years for Lee to become eligible for the naturalization that would allow her to vote. But even when the law did change in 1943, a quota limited the number of applications from Chinese immigrants to about 100 per year.

Lee died in 1966, one year after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated these quotas. Historians do not know whether Lee became an American citizen or ever voted in an election.

What we do know is that thanks to Lee and the many women like her — women whose names were rarely recorded in the history books — democracy was “applied to women,” as she had advocated. It took many more decades and many more marches for that to be true for all American women.