page_title: Mabel Ping-Hua Lee
section_title: Women's suffrage
hierarchical_section_title: Mabel Ping-Hua Lee / Women's suffrage
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: Youngest parader in New York City suffragist parade Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print.
context_page_description: Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was a Chinese advocate for women's suffrage in the United States, a member of the Women's Political Equality League, the "de-facto minister of the Chinese Baptist Mission", and the head of the First Chinese Baptist Church in New York's Chinatown for more than 40 years. She was born in China and raised in New York for the majority of her life. She attended Barnard College and Columbia University and earned a PhD in Economics from Columbia University in 1921, becoming the first Chinese woman in the United States to earn a PhD in Economics. She was a leader of the American Baptist Home Mission Society and established the First Chinese Baptist Church and the Chinese Community Center in New York City's Chinatown which were dedicated to social services for the immigrant community. She became a well-known figure in the women's suffrage movement and rode horseback in the 1912 New York pro-suffrage parade. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment began to prohibit the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex.
context_section_description: Mabel Lee's early suffragist and nationalist consciousness was influenced by her father's religious and nationalistic views for China and by New York's liberal environment. Before she was writing essays advocating equality in The Chinese Students’ Monthly, she was riding horseback as a teenager in the campaign for women's suffrage in New York state. On May 4, 1912, a sixteen year old Lee led a parade in support of women's voting rights with the likes of Annie Rensselaer Tinker, the Women's Political Union, and Anna Howard Shaw in New York. The parade grew a large crowd, up to ten thousand people were in attendance. Shaw carried a National American Woman Suffrage Association banner that stated: "N.A.W.S.A Catching Up with China" while Lee rode on horseback. She also led Chinese and Chinese-American women in a parade down Fifth Avenue in 1917 as a member of the Women's Political Equality League.
  In a 1914 issue of The Chinese Students' Monthly,  Lee wrote that feminism is “the extension of democracy or social justice and equality of opportunities to women”. She continued to write articles throughout college, calling for gender equality but also began giving speeches. At the Suffrage Workshop in 1915, Lee gave a speech that was covered in the New York Times. The speech was titled "China's Submerged Half" and stated:
  The welfare of China and possibly its very existence as an independent nation depend on rendering tardy justice to its womankind. 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.
  — Mabel Ping-Hua Lee
  In 1917, women won the right to vote in the state of New York, amending the state's constitution. However, Lee herself was unable to exercise that constitutional right because of the discriminatory federal naturalization laws of the time. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which was not repealed until 1943, barred Chinese immigrants from the process of naturalization. While Lee fought for equality and the right to vote, she and other immigrant women, were unable to reap the benefits until years later. Her mother supported the suffrage movement but also could not vote. It is unclear if Lee ever voted or if she became a US citizen.
  According to the only directly-attributed quote from Lee in a 1912 New-York Tribune article about her, entitled Chinese Girl Wants Vote, Lee's definition of suffrage was framed in the context of its benefit to the family, specifically a husband.
  "How can a marriage be happy?" she asked, "unless the wife is educated enough to understand and sympathize with her husband in his business and intellectual interests? That seems to be the great difference between the American and the Chinese ideals of education. The Chinese ideal is to make the girl a comfort and delight to her parents and later to her husband. The American ideal is to help the girl toward her own improvement for her own pleasure. It seems to me that each nation has something to learn from the other."
  In a later essay, The Meaning of Woman Suffrage Lee authored and published in The Chinese students' monthly, while providing arguments in favor of suffrage for the "interest" of the race, community, woman herself, husband, and child, she articulated her definition of the feminist movement as follows.
  "We believe in the idea of democracy; woman suffrage or the feminist movement (of which woman suffrage is a fourth part) is the application of democracy to women. ... The fundamental principle of democracy is equality of opportunity ... It means an equal chance for each man to show what his merits are. ... the feminists want nothing more than the equality of opportunity for women to prove their merits and what they are best suited to do."
caption: A photograph of the 1912 suffragist parade, in which Lee participated.
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