 | | The cover art for “Finish the Fight!” published by HMH/Versify.Illustration by Steffi Walthall |
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“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” |
— Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress |
This week we have an excerpt from “Finish the Fight!” — a history of the American suffrage movement. The book, which will be published next month, was written by six of my colleagues at The Times. (Check out that byline above!) Although they wrote the book specifically for middle-grade readers, I think — and hope — you’ll enjoy this preview as much as I have. |
— Francesca Donner, editor, In Her Words |
It took the better part of a century to pass a law saying American women had the right to vote. Three generations of women, and their male allies, worked tirelessly to make the 19th Amendment — which decreed that states could not discriminate at the polls on the basis of sex — a reality. We call the right to vote “suffrage,” but for a long time, that word was a kind of shorthand for women’s rights. Without the vote, suffragists argued, women had little say over their lives and their futures and certainly much less when it came to the larger political questions that shaped the nation. |
The 19th Amendment is a cornerstone of gender equality in our country, yet many of us know very little about the way the right to vote was won. For a long time, the history of the suffrage movement has been told mainly as the story of a few famous white women, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It’s true they were among the most important leaders of the movement in the 19th century. |
But there were tons more women who helped make suffrage a reality: African-American women like the writer and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the community organizer Juno Frankie Pierce and the journalists Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Elizabeth Piper Ensley and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who championed both suffrage and civil rights; Native American women, including Susette La Flesche Tibbles and Zitkala-Sa; queer women, including the poet Angelina Weld Grimké and the educator Mary Burrill; Latina women like Jovita Idár, who protected her family’s newspaper and the rights of Mexican-Americans; and Asian-American women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who led thousands of marchers in a 1912 suffrage parade in New York. They all fought for the vote as part of a broader struggle for equality, but their stories aren’t nearly as well known as they should be. |
 | | Mary Church Terrell, center left with a fur shawl, in 1947.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty Images |
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Mary Church Terrell and the Power of Language |
Sometimes freedom is a matter of timing. Mary Church Terrell knew that lesson well. She was born in Memphis in September 1863 — the middle of the Civil War. Her parents had been enslaved, but Mary was born free, and she charted a course of leadership that helped change the lives of women and men across the nation. She became a suffragist. She fought for the rights of all people of color. Holding America to the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all — became her life’s work. |
These dreams were supported by her parents. Her father, Robert Church, was the son of an enslaved woman and a wealthy steamship owner who had allowed Robert to keep his wages. After Robert gained his freedom, he invested in real estate and became wealthy. |
Mary attended Oberlin College, which was founded by abolitionists and was one of the first colleges in the United States to admit women and African-Americans. She would later write in her autobiography, “A Colored Woman in a White World,” that “it would be difficult for a colored girl to go through a white school with fewer unpleasant experiences occasioned by race prejudice than I had.” |
Mary had some extraordinary experiences. During her first year at Oberlin, she was invited to Washington by Blanche K. Bruce, one of the first African-American senators. He asked Mary to attend the inauguration of President James A. Garfield as his guest. It was during that trip that she met the great orator and activist Frederick Douglass. She would later follow in his footsteps, using her gift for language to speak up for the causes she believed in. |
She also wrote a paper at Oberlin on the topic of suffrage, titled “Should an Amendment to the Constitution Allowing Women the Ballot Be Adopted?” Mary became one of the first Black women to earn a college degree in the United States, graduating with a bachelor’s in classics in 1884. |
 | | An illustration from “Finish the Fight!” shows the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, “lifting as we climb.” Mary Church Terrell in an undated portrait.Illustration by Johnalynn Holland; Library of Congress |
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Later, after she earned a master’s degree, Mary embarked on a two-year tour of France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, studying languages and writing in her diary in French and German. |
While Mary traveled the world, the United States grew more unsteady. Lynching had become a form of domestic terrorism in the years after slavery. Over decades, thousands of Black men and women were brutally killed by white mobs, and their killers were never prosecuted. The government rarely made arrests in these cases, which only allowed the number of lynchings to grow. |
In 1895, Frederick died, and Mary became the first Black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education. She later raised funds and visited schools, encouraging them to celebrate Douglass Day, a precursor to Black History Month, in his honor. |
In 1896, Mary became a co-founder and the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, a coalition of more than a hundred local Black women’s clubs. The organization’s motto was “lifting as we climb.” |
Around this time, Mary began to champion the cause of suffrage. She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA, and was one of very few Black members. Her years at Oberlin and abroad had made her comfortable in predominantly white groups, and she took NAWSA to task for excluding women of color. An inclusive movement, she reasoned, would grow in both power and perspective. |
“Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs,” she said, “we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.” |
Mary knew that freedom for all was never about one battle. No single great win — the abolition of slavery, the passage of the 19th Amendment — would right the wrongs in a country founded on such injustices as slavery and the denial of women’s rights. But perhaps what made her life most extraordinary is how much joy she got from each small victory, how much stamina she displayed in her decades-long career as an activist. In 1953, the year before Mary died, The Washington Post wrote: “It may fairly be said of her that when she fought bigotry it was never with hatred; she met lethargy and prejudice with spirit and understanding. And she won the hearts as well as the minds of men.” |
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee’s Great Parade |
When Mabel Ping-Hua Lee moved to New York City from China as a child, around 1905, there were few Chinese immigrants on the East Coast. In 1910, the census reported that there were 5,266 people of Chinese descent living in the city, many of them in the neighborhood of Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. It was a new community, and the streets were alive with delicious smells, bright colors and voices from halfway around the world. |
By 1912, Mabel and her parents were living on Bayard Street in Chinatown, and they had made a name for themselves. Mabel’s father was a minister who led the First Chinese Baptist Church and was fluent in English. He was so active in the community that some referred to him as the neighborhood’s unofficial mayor. |
Everyone also knew the daughter of the “mayor,” and they knew how smart she was. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and had big plans to attend the women-only Barnard College, the sister school to the then all-male Columbia College. She hoped to return to China one day to open a school for girls. |
 | | Mabel Ping-Hua Lee in the 1920s. An illustration from “Finish the Fight!” of Mabel on her white horse during the 1912 suffrage parade in New York.Library of Congress; Illustration by Nhung Lê |
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Still, there was a limit to how much the community would stand behind her. And Mabel crossed the line when she became involved with the suffrage movement. The suffragists were considered radical — how dare they fight so steadfastly for equal rights? — but Mabel believed that voting was the key that would open every important door for women. |
She joined the cause and persuaded her mother to join, too, even though neither of them would be able to vote because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. (It was repealed in 1943.) |
Her mother’s participation in suffrage was so controversial that newspapers even wrote about it: “Tongues are still wagging in Chinatown,” The New York Tribune wrote, because Mabel and her mother “went to a suffrage meeting.” |
In 1912, when Mabel was just a teenager, she led a contingent of Chinese and Chinese-American women in one of the biggest suffrage parades in U.S. history. The New York Times reported, “Ten thousand strong, the army of those who believe in the cause of woman’s suffrage marched up Fifth Avenue at sundown yesterday in a parade the like of which New York never knew before.” |
Mabel didn’t merely march. She rode a white horse at the start of the parade, and she wore a three-cornered hat in the colors of the British suffrage movement: purple to symbolize that the cause of suffrage was noble; white for purity; and green, the color of spring, as a symbol of hope. (American suffragists usually substituted the gold of the sunflowers of Kansas — where they waged some of their earliest campaigns — for green.) |
In the fall, Mabel began her studies at Barnard. She majored in history and philosophy, wrote articles about suffrage and feminism for The Chinese Students’ Monthly magazine and gave a speech, “The Submerged Half,” which encouraged the Chinese immigrant community to promote girls’ education and women’s rights. “The welfare of China and possibly its very existence as an independent nation depend on rendering tardy justice to its womankind,” she said. “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.” |
Charlotte Brooks, the author of “American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949,” said that Mabel was part of a generation of young Chinese-Americans who traveled back and forth between China and the United States and saw the connections between the two struggles. |
She explained, “Something a lot of people in the U.S. don’t realize is that Mabel’s activism grew out of China’s New Culture Movement, which included the idea that the suppression of women, and the poor treatment of women, were both holding China back and represented a kind of backwardness.” |
Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | Ms. Chambrot writes about how she came to love her body after finding a supportive disability community on Instagram.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times |
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- “I wasn’t born disabled. That came 19 years later.” Three writers share how they revealed their disabilities — one to a family member, one to a love interest on a dating app and another to herself. [Read their stories]
- “You should do the housekeeping rather than running in shorts in a stadium.” The Dutch track star Fanny Blankers-Koen was greatly criticized at the time for competing in the 1948 London Olympics, but she took home four gold medals and transformed women’s athletics. [Read the story.]
- “Now we feel powerful.” When the Trump administration shut the borders to many new au pairs, those already in the country found they had something new: options. [Read the story]
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A More Equitable Financial Future |
By nearly every measure, women — and women of color in particular — have found themselves disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. |
How has the pandemic exacerbated existing financial obstacles for women? What can be done to solve them? |
Please join us on Thursday, July 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern for a conversation with Alicia Garza, principal at Black Futures Lab and co-founder of Black Lives Matter; Sallie Krawcheck, former Wall Street executive and co-founder and chief executive of Ellevest, a firm focused on closing the gender investment gap; and Bola Sokunbi, C.E.O. and founder of Clever Girl Finance. Hosted by Jessica Bennett, gender editor at large for The Times. |
In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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