Which Way to the Promised Land? Mabel Lee at the Intersection of Gender and Race
By Mimi Yang
Oppressed people across cultures embrace the Exodus narrative, in which Moses delivers the Israelites from slavery, as a source of hope and strength. “The Promised Land” has become more than a physical locale for modern-day seekers; it represents a cultural and spiritual sphere that offers freedom, equality, and fulfillment. [1] Mabel Ping Hua Lee (李彬华1896 – 1966), a Chinese feminist whose work and commitment was on par with her contemporary suffragists, also sought the Promised Land— a place for a better life and dreams for happiness and fulfillment. New York City entered Lee’s life as the gate, the world, and the destiny of her Promised Land. Intriguingly, her feminism and dedication to securing the universal right to vote originated from a seemingly distant cultural background. As an educated, Christian young woman from China, Lee crossed a cultural bridge from the Chinese to the American. However, in crossing she stumbled upon two significant societal roadblocks, feeling the double impact of racism and sexism. Lee arrived at the “Promised Land” of New York City at the historical moment of women’s suffrage movement at the beginning of the 20th century and, ironically, the movement reinforced the severity of these roadblocks.
Portrait of Chinese immigrant, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (李彬华1896–1966), on the 1913 (April 13) edition of the New-York Endowment Tribune. Lee fought for women’s voting rights, although she herself was barred from voting due to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Though she did not benefit from the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, she believed in the Promised Land of gender equality. New-York Endowment Tribune, April 13, 1912. Collections of the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/more-to-the-movement/mabel-ping-hua-lee/.
Lee was born to Lee Towe, who became a liberal minded Baptist minister at the American Christian Baptist Office in Guangzhou, and Lee Lai Beck, an educator, conversant in women’s rights and feminism. Mabel, their only child, was brought up as a modern, independent-minded woman when most Chinese women were taught to be obedient wives and virtuous mothers. [2] For example, Lee’s parents provided her with education and protected her from the age-old tradition of binding feet for Chinese girls. Mabel spent her childhood in China. [3] She earned Chinese classics, Baptist teachings, and American ideas. She learned English at a missionary school while exposed to traditional Chinese education from private tutors. [4] Timothy Tseng also acknowledges Lee’s integrated cultural, religious, and political views, “In addition to her father’s evangelical piety, she also shared his zeal to engage the social problems of the Chinese community in New York and overseas.” [5] This intercultural formation prepared her for her journey toward the Promised Land of New York City. In 1905, she won an academic scholarship that earned her an American visa. The family settled in New York City’s Chinatown, where Mabel attended Erasmus Hall Academy, the first secondary school chartered by the New York State Regents, and, in 1801, one of the earliest educational institutions to accept female students.
Cultured, well-heeled, and conversant in American values, the Lee family should have led a life of dignity, autonomy, and fulfillment in New York. However, the Lees arrived in America amid the Page Act (1875) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), which absorbed the Chinese American experience into anti-Chinese xenophobia and hysteria nationwide. Nevertheless, at Erasmus Hall, Lee was exposed to American notions of human rights, freedom, democracy, and equality, including the rights of minority groups. With the cultural and educational foundation laid there, the Academy instilled an interest in the activism that marked her future leadership and mobilization of Chinese women in the women’s suffrage march in New York during the peak of the movement.
Mabel then pursued undergraduate studies in history and philosophy at Barnard College, beginning in 1912. Her activism started at Barnard, when she joined the Chinese Students’ Association, ran for its president, and later wrote monthly essays. Her activism was spotlighted on May 6, 1912, when the Washington Post featured her in the horse brigade leading the way of the women’s suffrage parade in New York. [6] Her imposing image on horseback at the forefront was and still is evocative of the women-warrior trope in Chinese culture — the brave folk heroine Mulan, disguised as a man charging a horse on the battlefield, fighting for her family’s honor. This was an important moment in which she was seen crossing both gender and racial boundaries, side by side with white suffragists, at the forefront of the fight for the shared cause: gender equality. The Chinese Students’ Monthly at Barnard included her 1914 essay, “The Meaning of Woman Suffrage,” which argued that suffrage for women was necessary to a successful democracy. [7] At the age of eighteen, she wrote: [Woman suffrage] is nothing more than a wider application of our ideas of justice and equality. We all 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. [8] She continued “the fundamental principle of democracy is equality of opportunity,” including the right for women’s suffrage. [9]
While many Chinese immigrant women were largely invisible and silent, Lee was active and visible. In Cathleen Cahill’s historical account of Lee’s relation with white suffragist leaders, she notes that Mabel Lee met with Harriet Laidlow, chairman of the Manhattan Branch of the Women’s Suffrage Party, Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and wealthy patron of the cause, Alva Belmont. [10] The meeting was in New York City in 1912, not too long before the Washington Post featured parade marking Lee’s attendance. Mabel Lee and several other members of the Chinatown community joined national and state suffrage leaders at the Peking Restaurant at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street. Chinese community representatives — Mabel and her parents, powerful merchant wife Grace Yip Typond, teacher and missionary Pearl Loo — were not eligible to become US citizens and vote due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Nonetheless, they cared about women’s rights and were deeply swept into the American suffrage movement.
At the same time, the New York Tribune recognized Lee’s notoriety within the women’s suffrage movement. On April 13, 1912, the paper outlined Lee’s conviction: “Miss Lee means to learn all she can of American ways and to go back to China to teacher her sisters there.” [11] The paper positioned Lee at the forefront of feminism when she discussed gender equality in marriage: “How can a marriage be Happy?” she asked, “unless the wife is educated enough to understand and sympathise [sic] with her husband in his business and intellectual interests?” [12] This position certainly challenged gender relations in New York society at that time when women were expected to confine themselves at home raising children, keeping house, and serving their husbands. Three years later, in 1915, as a member of the Women’s Political Equality League, Lee was invited to give a speech “The Submerged Half,” when a Suffrage Shop was set up in New York. In that speech, once again Lee advocated gender equality in China, “I plead for a wider sphere of usefulness for the long submerged women of China,” she said, “I ask for our girls the open door to the treasury of knowledge, the same opportunities for physical development as boys and the same rights of participation in all human activities of which they are individually capable.” [13]
Then, in 1917 Lee organized Chinese and Chinese American women to parade down Fifth Avenue. The Women's Social and Political Union noticed Lee’s outspokenness and activism in the fight for women’s voting rights. From the mainstream perspective, Lee’s race was more noticeable than her gender, as her “Chineseness” directly linked her to the nascent feminism back in her native China. In parallel to the US women’s suffrage movement, events in China were gaining global attention. Educated in the U.S., Dr. Sun Yat-sen waged the Republican Revolution in 1911 and overthrew thousands of years of the feudalist and dynastic system. The new Republic of China (1912-1949) maintained the cross-cultural ties that the 19th-century Western missionaries forged in China. Dr. Sun’s government opened the window to American women’s suffrage fight, education opportunities for young women, female political voices, and the topic of envisioned gender equality. With a gendered racial perspective, white and well-informed suffragists in the US viewed feminism in China with cross-cultural curiosity. As the news that the Chinese government had enfranchised women spread, white suffragists reached out to Chinese women like Lee in Portland, Cincinnati, Boston, and New York City and invited them as speakers at various events and gatherings. Lee was brought to the “limelight” in the city as she began to be perceived as a commodity for the cause of American women’s suffrage. However, behind Lee’s glossy and triumphant horseback image in Washington Post, unbeknown to the public, her feet were shackled with the two leg irons — race and gender — on her way to the Promised Land.
The 1912 (May 6) Washington Post picture, featuring 16-year-old Chinese Mabel Ping Hua Lee (bottom left) on the horse brigade leading the way of the women’s suffrage parade, taking place in New York on May 4, 1912. The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanties, Columbia University, public lecture: https://sofheyman.org/media/videos/a-celebration-in-honor-of-the-100th-anniversary-of-dr-mabel-ping-hua-lees-phd-in-economics.
On the racial front, in the mid-19th century, the “Gold Rush” allured a large scale of immigration from southern China to the West Coast. Labeled as “Yellow Peril,” Chinese immigrants were deemed undesirable and unassimilable. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act — the only legislation in US history with an unambiguous racial target. The Act suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers and required every traveling Chinese person to carry a certificate identifying their status. On the gender front, as the prelude to the Chinese Exclusion Act seven years later, the Page Act of 1875 (named after its sponsor) aimed to end “the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” [15] Although Chinese women were the primary target, women of East Asia were all prohibited from entering the United States. In this way, Asian women were stereotyped and branded as sinful prostitutes, disregarding their individual and diverse backgrounds.
Thus, Lee was fettered by these two Acts and “paralyzed” legally at the intersection of race and gender, although her perceived image was up-and-coming. On November 6, 1917, New York granted women the right to vote, and in 1920 the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote nationally. When white women started to exercise their voting rights, Lee was left out as an irrelevant individual with no rights to be a citizen and to vote, buried in the shadow of history. Being part of the “Yellow Peril,” Lee was physically in the Promised Land, but legally excluded. Nonetheless, she did not let vitriolic racism define and trap her. She believed that shared gender oppression and fighting for women’s rights should connect white and Chinese women. She hoped that gender equality would remove racial inequality, and white suffragists would help with the racial injustice inflicted by the Chinese Exclusion Act.
However, the intersection of race and gender in Lee was more of a failure than a success. Although bringing white and Chinese suffragists together, the intersection cut them apart. By joining the shared gender fight, they hoped to get their voices calling for racial injustice heard on a mainstream platform. On the other side, nonetheless, race was not an immediate or relatable issue for white suffragists as they focused on what sparked the movement – gender. White suffragists saw the Chinese immigrant women just as a helpful link to stretch the imagination to a remote and unknown world. In their eagerness to arm the American cause with Chinese arguments and shaming effects towards America’s men-only voting system, white suffragists were not ready to unpack the injuries inflicted upon the Chinese sisters by the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Their acute and immediate concern was why in the US, the beacon of freedom and equality, half of the population were still not equal citizens with voting rights while in a deeply patriarchal China, women were voting. The trans-Pacific conversations on women’s suffrage were then short-lived.
In 1916, Lee graduated from Barnard College with a bachelor’s degree in History and Philosophy as the only Chinese student in her class. All of her activism for suffrage took place before she earned a Ph.D. in economics at Colombia University in 1921 as the university’s first Chinese woman doctorate. Throughout the years, Lee worked tirelessly with fellow Chinese immigrant women or white suffragists. Lee and other prominent female figures (Grace Typond and Mai Zhouyi, etc) from Chinatown continued to advocate educational opportunities for Chinese girls and boys in New York City. They also called for US citizenship for Chinese immigrants.
And yet, while the passing of 19th Amendment in 1920 was a gigantic step towards the founding ideal of equality in American history, it did not mean too much to Chinese women, as they were still under the law of the Chinese Exclusion Act, de jure and de facto, until 1943 when the Act ended. Lee devoted her life to the fight for women’s rights and racial justice and died in 1966 with no confirmation of whether she became an American citizen or voted in the US. “Standard” history does have a place for the transformative women’s suffrage movement but conveniently erases a leading Chinese suffragist. In Mabel Lee race and gender were forcefully bifurcated. Which way to the Promised Land for a woman of color like Lee remains to be answered. [16]
Mimi Yang, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Carthage College, is a researcher and writer based in Boston. She has published extensively (books and articles) in cultural, literary, and history studies, focusing on North and South American themes. Her work “An Intimate Dialog between Race and Gender at Women’s Suffrage Centennial” gained traction internationally.
[1] The first part of the title “Which way to the Promised Land” is borrowed from the title of Paula J. Massood’s “Which Way to the Promised Land? Spike Lee's Clockers and the Legacy of the African American City.” African American Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 263-279 Published by: Indiana State University Stable.
[2] As Mabel Lee’s life and biography has more than one version in English resources due to the lack of recording and archives. Instead of going with the discrepancies between those versions, I used Chinese Bai Du (百度) to search for this info in Chinese language (https://usdandelion.com/archives/7473). Mr. Lee Towe’s background in this paragraph is my paraphrase from Bai Du, in comparison with English language sources.
[3] “Christian Today” states: “李韬的女儿李彬华于1896年在广州出生。她在中国度过了她的孩提时代，并在就读一所宣教士学校期间精通了英语” https://zh.christianitytoday.com/2023/01/mabel-lee-chinatown-suffragist-pastor-organizer-zh-hans/ The author translated this from Chinese to English.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Timothy Tseng, “Asian American Legacy: Dr. Mabel Lee,” https://timtseng.net.
[6] “Suffrage Hosts Mounted and on Foot Impress the Metropoli,” The Washington Post (May 6, 1912) p.2 https://newspaperarchive.com/washington-post-may-06-1912-p-2/ and New York Times (1912) “Suffrage Army Out on Parade; Perhaps 10,000 Women and Men Sympathizers March for the Cause,” New York Times, May 5, 1912.
[7] The entire essay is embedded in Tseng’s blog, https://timtseng.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/mabel-lee-the-meaning-of-woman-suffrage-1914.pdf
[8] This quote is from the embedded essay in Tseng’s blog. See notes 6 and 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] My description on Mabel Lee’s relationship with Harriet Laidlow, Anna Howard Shaw and Alva Belmont is taken from Cahill’s original account in her “Mabel Ping-Hua Lee: How Chinese-American Women Helped Shape the Suffrage Movement.” P.4 https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mabel-ping-hua-lee-how-chinese-american-women-helped-shape-the-suffrage-movement.htm accessed on July 28, 2024
[11] “Chinese Girl Wants to Vote,” New York Tribune (April 13, 1912). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_keady_ver01/data/sn83030214/00206531526/1912041301/0219.pdf
[12] Ibid.
[13] Michael Lee, “The 16-Year Old Chinese Immigrant Who Helped Lead a 1912 US Suffrage March: Mabel Ping-Hua Lee fought for the rights of women on two sides of the world,” https://www.history.com/news/chinese-american-womens-suffrage-mabel-ping-hua-leehttps://www.history.com/news/chinese-american-womens-suffrage-mabel-ping-hua-lee
[14] The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded in 1903 in the UK and controlled by Emmeline Pankhurst. Although some controversies on the militant aspect of the organization, it was later known as the suffragettes.
[15] Peffer, George Anthony (1986), "Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page Law, 1875-1882," Journal of American Ethnic History, 6 (1): 28–46. P.28
[16] The author of the blog wishes to thank Susan Goodier for her encouragement to write this blog and her comments and edits during the final proofreading stage.