How did an immigrant teenager living in New York’s insular Chinatown attract the attention of voting rights activists? In 1911, when a revolution upended China’s imperial system and established the Republic of China, U.S. suffragists took note of news that women there, while long subjugated, had gained some voting rights. In the spring of 1912, they reached out to Chinese enclaves around the U.S., inviting women to white suffrage meetings to share tales of women’s role in the uprising. Mabel Lee, still in high school but already active politically, was among the invited speakers.
Lee and her family, who immigrated under a slim exception to the Exclusion Act, held prominent roles in New York City’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 aware and modern, refusing to bind her feet as her mother’s had been—a stark reminder of how Chinese women had been traditionally held back for centuries. As a teen, Mabel worked in the community YWCA and helped raise money for Chinese famine victims.
At the suffrage meeting, 16-year-old Lee spoke about her beliefs of equal educational opportunities for Chinese children in New York City and the discrimination Chinese women faced in America.
Her presence impressed the suffragists, prompting them to invite Lee to help lead New York City’s upcoming 1912 suffrage parade.
The New-York Tribune, one of several newspapers that trumpeted her role in the upcoming parade, cited her “brilliant accomplishments” and credited her family: “Miss Lee inherits from her father a strong mind and an admiration for American institutions. This mind is, indeed, so strong that it compels her to look through what she considers the one defect in the institutions—namely, the limited franchise (suffrage).”
Lee Rode at the Head of the Suffrage March
On May 4 of that year, Lee was among several dozen women riding on horseback ahead of an estimated 10,000 protesters (including many sympathetic men). They marched up 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 advance guard on horseback (Lee among them) wore black three-cornered hats and “Votes for Women” sashes. The Times noted that least one of the parade banners expressed suffragists’ support for their Chinese sisters in America, reading: “Women Vote in China, But Are Classed With Criminals and Paupers in New York.” And it made mention of Lee’s mother and other women from New York’s Chinatown who marched with the sign “Light from China.”