In 1900, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned most Chinese immigration and reflected a climate of deep anti-Asian prejudice, 9-year-old Mabel Ping-Hua Lee came from China to America thanks to a scholarship to go to school. At 16, she would solidify her place in the history of women’s suffrage, helping to lead a historic march in New York City.
But while she fought for women’s suffrage, she herself would not be eligible to vote for decades after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. That’s because the exclusion law prohibited Chinese immigrants. to obtain the rights of American citizenship.
Yet Lee continued to fight – not just for suffrage, but for education and equality – for women on both sides of the world, while working locally to uplift her own Chinatown community.
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This newspaper clipping shows Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, the first Chinese woman to earn a doctorate. from Columbia University. Lee, who immigrated to New York as a child from China, was involved in missionary work and participated in the struggle for women’s suffrage.
The National Archives, public domain
Suffragists exploited in Chinese politics
How did an immigrant teenager living in New York’s island Chinatown gain the attention of voting rights activists? In 1911, when a revolution upset the Chinese imperial system and established the Republic of China, American suffragists took note of the news that women there, though long subjugated, had been granted voting rights. In the spring of 1912, they contacted Chinese enclaves in the United States, inviting women to white suffrage meetings to share stories about the role of women in the uprising. Mabel Lee, still in high school but already politically active, was among the guest speakers.
Lee and his family, who immigrated under a slim exception to the exclusionary law, have held prominent roles in New York’s Chinese community. Her father served as a Baptist missionary pastor in Chinatown, and both parents worked for the church as teachers. They raised their daughter to be politically conscious and modern, refusing to tie her feet like her mother had been – a stark reminder of how Chinese women had traditionally been restrained for centuries. As a teenager, Mabel worked in the YWCA community and helped raise funds for famine victims in China.
At the vote meeting, Lee, 16, spoke about her beliefs about equal educational opportunity for Chinese children in New York City and the discrimination Chinese women face in America.
His presence impressed suffragists, prompting them to invite Lee to help lead the next New York suffrage parade in 1912.
The New York Tribune, one of the many newspapers that touted her role in the upcoming parade, cited her “brilliant accomplishments” and credited her family: “Miss Lee inherits a strong spirit and admiration for American institutions from her father. This spirit is, in fact, so strong that it obliges her to examine what she considers to be the only flaw of the institutions, namely the limited right to vote (suffrage).
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Lee Rode at the head of the suffrage march
A colorized photograph of the suffrage parade in New York, May 1912.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
On May 4 of the same year, Lee was one of several dozen women on horseback in front of around 10,000 demonstrators (many of them sympathetic men). They walked on Fifth Avenue, starting in Greenwich Village and ending at Carnegie Hall.
The New York Times, in its extensive, multi-page coverage of the event, reported that the Mounted Vanguard (Lee among them) wore black three-wedge hats and “Votes for Women” scarves. The Times noted that at least one of the banners in the parade expressed suffragists’ support for their Chinese sisters in America, reading: “Women vote in China, but are ranked among the criminals and the poor in New York.” And he made mention of Lee’s mother and other women in New York’s Chinatown who paraded with the “Light of China” sign.
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She continued to defend women’s rights
After the parade, Lee attended Barnard College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia Teachers College. Later, at Columbia, she became the first Chinese-American woman to earn a doctorate in economics.
Throughout, she continued to fight for women’s suffrage – and more. In May 1914, at the age of 18, she published “The Meaning of Woman’s Voting Rights” in the college The Chinese Student Monthly, where she wrote that “the fundamental principle of democracy is equality of opportunity”, including the right to suffrage for women. In 1915, she gave a speech, “The Submerged Half,” which advocated for gender equality in China.
“I am arguing for a wider sphere of utility for long-submerged Chinese women,” Lee said in the speech. “I ask our daughters for the open door to the treasure of knowledge, the same opportunities for physical development as boys and the same rights to participate in all human activities of which they are individually capable.”
And in 1917, Lee led another suffrage parade, this time comprised of Chinese and Chinese Americans.
“She did all of this at a time when there was something called the Asian Forbidden Zone,” says Queens College president Frank Wu, who specializes in Asian American and island history. of the Pacific. Considering the limits this “area” places on Chinese immigrants to America, “Mabel’s accomplishments are remarkable, period.”
READ MORE: Why the 19th Amendment didn’t grant all women the right to vote
Lee Herself was not eligible to vote until the 1940s
This radio telegram confirmed for the immigration and naturalization service (INS) that Mabel Lee had boarded the liner Yokohama Maru on October 20, 1929, corroborating what she told the agency about her plans for overseas travel in 1937. The telegraph is from Lee’s Chinese Exclusion Act file.
The National Archives, public domain
Despite Lee’s activism for women’s suffrage, she would not be able to vote until long after the passage of the 19th Amendment – when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943.
Yet, according to Laura Nechamkin, director of education at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City, Lee did it all because women’s suffrage in America embodied the egalitarian ideals she believed in. She also hoped it would empower – and help uplift – a part of her own community: Chinese Americans born in the United States. “Even though it was completely altruistic for her to do this, knowing that [suffrage] would not apply to it for some time, that does not mean that there is no hope of this equal opportunity, ”says Nechamkin.
Her goal was to eventually return to China to fight for equal educational opportunity with the women there. But she never came back for good. Upon her father’s death in 1924, she became director of the first Chinese Baptist Church in New York City, focusing largely on providing resources to her local Chinese community. There she was known to have founded the Chinese Christian Center which had a health clinic, kindergarten, vocational training and English lessons.
Lee accomplished a lot in her life until her death in 1966. “What is most shocking is that no one seems to know if she voted… once all the barriers have finally been lifted”, said Nechamkin.
Despite this, she helped pave the way for others to do so, adding a valuable voice to the women’s suffrage movement, a voice that would continue until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
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