Lee stood out as a Chinese immigrant, giving speeches, writing articles and helping to lead a 10,000-strong march through the streets of New York City when she was just a teenager.

In the late-afternoon sun on May 4, 1912, a brigade of women on horseback cast long shadows on the grass of Washington Square Park in Manhattan as they set off leading 10,000 people on one of the biggest marches for women’s suffrage that the nation had ever seen.

One of the women was Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who directed her white horse around the east side of the park’s grand arch and up Fifth Avenue. Like the other women, she wore a black three-cornered hat and a sash bearing the words “Votes for Women.” But she was different from her fellow suffragists: She was a Chinese immigrant.

At a time when Chinese migration to the United States was largely banned under the Chinese Exclusion Act, Lee, who was just a teenager at the time, refused to blend into the background. She published articles in a monthly magazine for Chinese students in America and gave speeches in which she articulated a bold, transnational vision for democracy based on Christian values of equality.

Read more of this article by Jia Lynn Yang from The New York Times's series Overlooked, and part of The Times's continuing coverage of the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

* Image Credit: Chinese Students Monthly, ca 1915 / Public domain
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Mabel-lee-chinese-st...