Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and the Chinese American women of the suffrage movement

At sixteen, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was invited to ride in the honor guard that led a huge suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue in New York in 1912, even though the law that governed her family made it impossible for her ever to become a United States citizen. Historian Cathleen D. Cahill of Penn State tells her story and the wider one of how Chinese and Chinese American women helped shape the suffrage movement, in an article first published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission and carried on the National Park Service's site.

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, from a newspaper of April 13, 1912. Library of Congress collections.

Excluded by law

Few Chinese women lived in the United States in the early twentieth century because Congress had passed laws to keep Chinese immigrants out. The article says the Page Act of 1875 was aimed at Chinese women, using the language of excluding prostitutes, and that the 1882 Exclusion Act sharply cut the number of Chinese immigrants and denied them naturalization. It describes the Chinese as the only people in the world ineligible to become U.S. citizens, and notes that immigration laws wrote racist ideas about who could be American into law.

A modern upbringing

Mabel Lee came from Canton, now Guangzhou, around 1900 at about five years old. Her family settled in New York City, where her father was the Baptist minister of the Morningside Mission in Chinatown. Her parents could immigrate because they were teachers working for the Baptist Church, one of the few exceptions to the Exclusion Act. They raised their only child as a modern woman: they did not bind her feet, taught her Chinese classics at home and sent her to public school, where she was the only Chinese student in her graduating class.

Because they could not become citizens, such families watched China closely, and many supported Sun Yat-sen and his goal of modernizing China, including women's rights. Mabel and her mother raised money for famine victims, worked with the YWCA and joined Chinatown parades, and they followed the 1911 revolution that ended imperial rule.

Meeting the suffrage leaders

News spread that China had enfranchised women, though the article says the reality was more complicated. White suffragists wanted to hear more, and in spring 1912 Chinese women from several cities spoke at their meetings, telling of a women's brigade that fought beside men in the revolution and appealing for help against demeaning immigration laws.

In New York, Lee and others from Chinatown met suffrage leaders at the Peking Restaurant, among them Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the wealthy patron Alva Belmont. Lee, still a high school student and recently accepted to Barnard College, said Chinese women faced both sexism and racial prejudice and urged fairer education for Chinese girls and boys in New York. The leaders were so impressed they asked her to help lead the parade.

The parade

Newspapers nationwide printed her picture. Her mother and other Chinatown women marched in another section carrying the flag of the new republic and a sign reading "Light from China," turning around the common idea that American values had to be taught to China. Shaw marched in front of them with a banner reading "NAWSA Catching Up with China," meant to shame American men into backing suffrage.

After the parade

That fall Lee entered Barnard. She spoke to suffrage audiences and, in 1915, was invited by the Women's Political Union to give a speech, covered by The New York Times, urging the Chinese community to promote girls' education and women's civic participation. She worked in the Chinese Students' Alliance and wrote in its Chinese Students' Monthly that women's rights should be built into the new republic from the start.

Mabel Lee in the Chinese Students' Monthly, 1915.

New York gave women the vote in 1917 while Lee still could not vote as a noncitizen. She entered a Ph.D. program at Columbia and earned a doctorate in economics there in 1921, the first Chinese woman in the United States to do so. Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924, which further restricted Chinese immigration and extended the restrictions to all of Asia, a disappointment to Chinese suffragists.

With few opportunities for highly educated Chinese women in the United States, many of her peers returned to China. Lee was offered a teaching post at a Chinese university but stayed, took over her father's mission, which later became the First Chinese Baptist Church in New York, and led it while working with the Chinatown community. Her church and community later had the local post office dedicated to her. The article argues that Chinese suffragists, though few, played a visible, important role: they fought for equality of sex and race, taught white leaders about the worldwide fight for women's rights, and pressed for women's rights in the new republic.

Sources

• Cathleen D. Cahill (associate professor of history, Penn State University), "Mabel Ping-Hua Lee: How Chinese-American Women Helped Shape the Suffrage Movement," first published on April 30, 2020 by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission on its blog and carried by the National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mabel-ping-hua-lee-how-chinese-american-women-helped-shape-the-suffrage-movement.htm); the portraits are from the Library of Congress collections and a 1915 magazine; rewritten in hubnx's own words.