Her writings on democracy and feminism advocated equal educational opportunities for Chinese women.
Words By Caroline Cao
New York City, May 5, 1912. More than 10,000 people marched for women’s suffrage, and one of its lead marchers was a 16-year-old Chinese immigrant on horseback, wearing “a tri-cornered black hat, with the green, purple, and white cockade of the Woman’s Political Union.” Her name was Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (1896-1966).
A reductive history valorizes American women’s suffrage as predominantly the labor of white women—erasing the complexities and contributions of Black, Chinese and Indigenous suffragists. Lee is among these stories. Born in Canton, China (present-day Guangzhou), she was the daughter of Christian minister Lee To and teacher Lia Beck. As a missionary, Lee’s father was permitted into the United States under exemptions of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1901, Lee’s mother applied for immigration papers as a teacher and attained an exemption, and thus, she and Lee were able to reunite with Lee’s father in California. The family later ended up in New York City, where Lee To was eventually appointed as minister for Morningstar Mission.
As described in Cathleen D. Cahill’s book, Recasting the Vote, the desire to upend anti-Chinese racism and advocate for women’s right to vote—both in the United States and in China—spurred many Chinese and Chinese American activists like Lee into organizing and leading suffrage movements. Many were galvanized by the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which signified promises for women’s suffrage in China (but it wasn’t actually until China’s 1954 Constitution, under the People’s Republic of China, that equal voting rights for Chinese women were codified). The story goes that during these movements, Lee called out—an act of “Mabelizing,” says Cahill—their collaborating white suffragists for underserving the plight of the less-advantaged Chinese women.
Lee’s subsequent “Submerged Half” speech in 1916 for the Women’s Political Union’s Suffrage Shop critiqued the Chinese foot-binding practice that limited her mother’s mobility—Lee’s mother also participated in the May 1912 parade but had to ride in a vehicle due to her bound feet. Lee pleaded for the “same opportunities for physical development as boys, and the same rights of participation in all human activities of which they are individually capable.”
Lee’s writings on democracy and feminism
An active member of the Chinese Students’ Alliance, Lee exercised her intellectualism in its Chinese Students’ Monthly journal. Her essay, “The Meaning of Suffrage,” was published in the journal’s May 12, 1914 edition, in which she conceived democracy in four stages: “first, the moral, religious spiritual; second, legal; third, political; and, fourth, economic.” As an unmarried woman at the time who never ended up marrying, she argued for “favor of economic independence” for both married and unmarried women.
Lee also wrote on the distinction between theory and practice in her “Moral Training in Chinese Schools” piece in the same journal in June 1916: “We cannot expect a child to be moral in his actions if we only train him in theory…school ought to be made a community where the child actually lives and works instead of a place where he merely recites his lessons,” being key to training students for executing democratic ideals.
However, due to the Exclusion Act, Lee still couldn’t vote after the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, which granted women the right to vote. The amendment did not protect women of color—particularly Black women of the Civil Rights Movement era—from the voter suppression barriers and violence (including poll taxes, literacy tests, language barriers, and police brutality) in the following decades. There is no known evidence that Lee ever became naturalized as an American citizen and exercised her vote upon the 1943 repealing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which would have opened up the opportunity for her and Chinese women in the United States. Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965 lifted many voter suppression barriers for women of color, white supremacist efforts to gut and erode these protections continue today.
Lee became the first Chinese woman to receive a doctorate, earning it in economics from Columbia University in 1921. For her dissertation, she authored the book The Economic History of China: With Special Reference to Agriculture, dedicating it to “better understanding between American and Chinese Peoples [for the] helpful co-operation to the welfare and happiness of all.” It was Lee’s wish to return to China with her American education to teach fellow Chinese women. In the early 1920s, on a trip to China, she was offered a position to become dean of women at a college in the Chinese city of Amoy, but many factors would thwart her China plans.
A quest to own her church
In November 1924, Lee’s father died of a stroke, likely over the stress of attempting to broker peace between Chinese gangs. Five months later, the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the New York City Baptist Mission Society appointed Lee as director of her father’s mission, which had previously been carried out in a rented building. To memorialize her father, she searched and raised money for a permanent home for her inherited church, finding a building on Pell Street in New York. At her friend’s advice, the scholar Hu Shih, she operated the mission as a social service center, the Chinese Christian Center, where she organized carpentry, radio, and typewriting classes.
Lee subsequently visited her birthplace in Canton in 1937 during the Japanese Imperial Army’s attack on China. The danger dashed her hopes of living and teaching in China, and she applied for a return permit to the United States and returned to tend to her Pell Street Baptist mission.
In a 1996 Organization of American Historian presentation, Timothy Tseng, an assistant professor of church history at Denver Seminary, wrote of Lee’s long campaign to control her independent Chinese church and wrest it from white-dominated denominational control. During the Great Depression, she saw the opportunity to buy and fully own the church’s Pell Street property but struggled against the Baptist Missionary Board’s authority. She invested her family’s savings and income—from her printing stationary import business—to fight for her church’s Pell Street property. By the time she finally gained ownership of her independent church in the 1950s, her congregation had diminished, and younger Chinese Protestants focused their cause on assimilated churches.
Lee died in relative obscurity in 1966. In November 2017, U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez introduced a bill to designate the Chinatown Post Office in New York as the Mabel Lee Memorial Post Office to honor Lee. The First Chinese Baptist Church, still standing at 21 Pell Street, celebrated this honor.
- Caroline Cao is an NYC-based writer. A queer Vietnamese American woman, she also won’t shut up about animation and theatre. She likes ramen, pasta, and fan fiction writing. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @Maximinalist.
- Joy Sauce first published the article.
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