Mabel Ping-Hua Lee is impressing the hell out of everyone
THE YEAR IS 1912. You are a Chinese American woman astride a horse in the New York women's suffrage parade. Later everyone talks about Inez Milholland on her damn horse in the DC parade and no one mentions how cool you looked in New York, but that's fine. But how did you end up here, in Annie Tinker's brigade of horsewomen?
Mabel Lee is amazing and let's talk about her real quick.
She was born in Guangzhou, China and moved to New York with her family when she was eight. They lived in a tenement in Chinatown and when she was SIXTEEN she went to Barnard College, majored in history and philosopgy, joined the Debating Club and Chinese Students' Association and wrote articles for The Chinese Students' Monthly where she was all yeah, women need the vote, OBVIOUSLY (only phrased more eloquently).
Then she got a master's degree in education administration, and THEN -- not done! -- she got into Columbia at 20 to get her doctorate in economics. YEAH THAT IS RIGHT. She was the first woman to receive a PhD from Columbia. Mabel Lee. Let's all clap 100 years later.
So in the midst of all this. By which I mean when she was 15 years old and right before she went to Barnard, she rode a damn horse in the suffrage parade in New York City. Four years later, women in New York got the vote, and in 1920, the 19th Amendment was passed, but guess what? Mabel still couldn't vote. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
"What does that terrible-sounding act say" you ask. It says that Chinese immigrants could NOT BE CITIZENS, and wasn't repealed until 1943. I don't have the space to talk about how terrible this act was, but it essentially froze Chinese immigration to the United States from 1882 to 1943. There were a few people who could come (see: Lee's parents) but this unbelievably embarrassing legislation was born of heightened Chinese immigration during the Gold Rush and subsequent intense racism, and was signed into law by Chester A. Arthur. I want to note that Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed it earlier, so maybe we should look into that guy.
-looks into him-
"Hayes was a lawyer and staunch abolitionist who defended refugee slaves in court proceedings in the antebellum years."
Guys, maybe Rutherford B. Hayes was GREAT? And Chester A. Arthur was the worst?
Anyway, the main actual point here is that Mabel Lee was a brilliant, brave, badass of a lady and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was racist af and you'd think we'd have learned from it but nope, here we are today. Go Mabel, and all your postwar economics studies.