Mabel Ping-Hua Lee

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And this
episode is a topic that I believe is on both
of our lists. I had not gotten to it, and

(00:23):
then I met and had a chat with Avon. So
she is one of the women selected to be part
of the Seneca Women Podcast Academy, and Avon had suggested
to me Mabel ping Hallie as a show topic, and
so she moved to the top of my list. Also,
keep an ear out for Avon's podcasting coming months. She's
developing one with that program and it will be out

(00:45):
at some point later this year. Um, Mabel is one
of those people who is Chinese. She tended to use
her Anglicized name of Mabel Lee throughout her life, at
least publicly. So we will do the same um in
parts so that no one has to listen to me,
probably do a really bad pronunciation of Asian vowels, which

(01:06):
is always very tricky for me. UM, So just know
that as we're going through it, and also, as you
may know, May is Asian American Pacific islander history month.
And while we are not generally governed on the show
by calendar months, because we'll try to talk about people
from various communities throughout the year, this one does line
up nicely with the wrap up of May. So. Mabel

(01:27):
Penguali was born in Guangzo, China. It's also known as
canton In and when she was still a small child,
her father, Lito, left China to be a missionary in
the United States. So you'll also see his name, of
course as Totally, and the spelling of Toe sometimes varies

(01:48):
from source to source. When he first went to North America, Mabel,
her mother, and her grandmother all stayed in China. Lito
was part of a movement that wanted to see cha
and a modernize, and part of that modernization, in his opinion,
included transitioning to Protestantism. Protestantism was linked to the kind
of social reform that really appealed to him. He had

(02:11):
been a laborer in China, and he thought that without modernizing,
people like him would never really be able to improve
their lives beyond a very modest existence. So he learned
English and a missionary school and was assigned a position
in the US Northwest by the American Baptist Home Mission
Society in the late nineteenth century, so he was going

(02:32):
to work within the Chinese community there. And in nineteen
o four, Leto or totally either way you would like
to do it, was transferred, promoted really to a position
in New York City doing the exact same kind of
work he had in the Pacific Northwest, this time in
the Morning Star Baptist Mission in Chinatown. It was in

(02:52):
nineteen o five, not long after Leto's moved to New York,
that Mabel and her mother joined him. Mabel are he
spoke English when she arrived in New York, and she
was enrolled at one of the oldest schools in the country.
That was Erasmus Hall Academy, which was founded in seventeen
eighty six and it still exists on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.
It's on the National Register of Historic Places, although it

(03:15):
is not open to the public. And as a student there,
maybe Lee was surrounded by other immigrant children. Some were Chinese,
but most of them were Jewish or Italian immigrants from Europe.
It seems that from her earliest years, Mabel was a
natural activist. When she was just sixteen. She was a
prominent figure on the New York suffragists scene. That year,

(03:37):
which was nineteen twelve, New York's Suffragist group staged two
parades in the city. The first took place on May fourth.
The parade route started in Greenwich Village on Fifth Avenue
at Washington Square, and from there the participants made their
way up the avenue to the south end of Central
Park at fifty ninth Street, and then turned west towards
Seventh Avenue. The parade turns south for two blocks, ending

(04:01):
at Carnegie Hall. The parade started at five pm and
an estimated ten thousand people marched in it. This took
a year of planning to pull it off, and it
was covered extensively in the press, and some of that
press was specifically about Mabel Lee. She only got a
brief mention in the New York Times right up about
the parade, which included her as an example of the

(04:23):
diversity of the participants, writing quote, there was one of
the enfranchised Chinese women on horseback, Miss Mabel Lee. Ah,
I'm just having thoughts about the diversity of the movement
at that point, which in a lot of rice really
wasn't right. But to to the New York Times, it

(04:43):
looked very diverse. From these there were diverse participants, and
we'll talk about that, but they did not all benefit
from it. The movement really benefited white women. Yeah. This
has been a theme of our episodes about the suffrage
movement in the United States in particular, but elsewhere also. Anyway,
even before the parade, Mabel was featured in the press

(05:06):
for her work and her expected appearance in the parade,
and a syndicated article that ran in several newspapers on
May sewod she was mentioned among several other participants who
were singled out by name. Quote ms. Lee is a
daughter of Mrs Lee Toe, who is also a suffragist
and a Columbia University student. Yeah, that that phrasing makes

(05:28):
it sound like her mother is a suffragist and Columbia
University student. But that is just a bad copy. And
they were talking about Mabel Um several weeks before that. Though.
On April thirt so, a couple of weeks before the parade,
there was an entire article devoted entirely to Mabel Lee's
story in the New York Tribune under the headline Chinese

(05:50):
girl wants vote, and it included a large portrait photograph
of Lee. This article opens with quote regarding her as
the symbol of the new era, when all their women
will be free and unhampered. All of Chinatown is proud
of little miss Mabel Lee, daughter of the mission pastor
Dr Lee Too, and her brilliant accomplishments. So the choice

(06:13):
of the word little probably seems infantalizing here, and the
article goes on to speak about Mabel's strong mind and
how her convictions have led her to the suffrage movement.
There's this really odd and exoticized description of her mother,
though that was no doubt included to elicit some shock
and to remind readers that Lee was still inherently foreign.

(06:35):
Keep in mind also that the journalist involved probably didn't
really know all that much about Chinese culture. So this
passage reads quote, Miss Lee's mother is the link that
holds her and her missionary father bound to the old era.
Mrs Lee To has feet about two inches long, encased
in red slippers, and she seldom goes out of the house.

(06:56):
She would have to descend four flights of stairs to
do so, but it is not a question of comfort
only she is high cast, and it would not be
seemly for her to walk in the streets observed by men,
so Mrs Lee's feet were bound. And perhaps the journalist
was hoping to offer kind of a contrast between Mabel's
life and her mother's through including this detail, But it's

(07:19):
also a little jarring in the context of the article,
which goes from describing plans for the upcoming parade to
this part of her mother's life. Yeah, it's a very
strange transition. And then the article once again makes a
pretty abrupt transition because it returns to just talking about
Mabel and her life goals, mentioning that she hopes to
return to China after she has finished with school and

(07:41):
teach women there. But then it veers once again, noting
that her education is for the benefit of her future husband.
There is a quote from Mabel included, stating quote, how
can a marriage be happy unless the wife is educated
enough to understand and sympathize with her husband in his
business and intellectual interests. This seems to be the great

(08:04):
difference between the American and the Chinese ideals of education.
The Chinese ideal is to make the girl a comfort
and delight to her parents and later to her husband.
The American ideal is to help the girl toward her
own improvement for her own pleasure. It seems to me
that each nation has something to learn from the other.

(08:25):
One of the reasons that Mabel was so high profile
was because of what had been happening in China and
the years leading up to the New York Parade that
made her quite famous. In nineteen eleven, when the Chan
dynasty was deposed, women in China gained the right to vote.
So this made somebody like Mabel a source of fascination
for US suffragists, even though she had been a little

(08:47):
girl when she moved to New York. Because she was
already active in the women's movement, she spoke a lot
about this step forward for Chinese women when she was
talking to women's groups in the New York area. It's
probably but that there was a desire to use China's
newly established women's voting rights to try to prod American legislators.
It played on their inherent belief that the United States

(09:09):
was more advanced and its thinking than other countries were,
and pointed out that the United States had fallen behind
on this issue. Yeah, it almost seems a little like
the white leaders of this movement were kind of using
Mabel's Chinese identity is a little bit of a tool here,
and it's unclear whether she was cognizant of that or not.

(09:33):
Um she was certainly very outspoken about it, though. On
the day of the parade itself, Mabel rode on horseback
at the front of the procession, and this is often
described in a way that makes it seem like she
was this lone horseback rider that led the parade, and uh,
that was not the case. There was actually an entire
contingent of suffragists riding horses in the first group. Mabel

(09:56):
was not even the leader of that group. Mabel's horse
was white, which provided a sharp contrast to her black
tricorn hat. That hat was worn by all of the
women on horseback. We will pause here for a quick
sponsor break, and then when we returned, we'll talk about
Mabel's time in college. In nineteen twelve, the same year

(10:24):
as that parade, Mabel enrolled at Bernard College in New
York City. Bernard had been founded as an all women's
school associated with Columbia University because Columbia would not admit women.
Mabel became active in the Chinese Student Association and contributed
to the associated periodical Chinese Students Monthly. These essays that

(10:46):
she was writing really continued her feminist activism. In nineteen fourteen,
she wrote a particularly popular essay titled The Meaning of
Woman's Suffrage, and in her opening paragraph she shows her
disdain for the way that the women's suffrage movement had
become something of a joke in some circles, writing quote,
it is a fact that no matter where we go,

(11:06):
we cannot escape hearing about woman's suffrage. Yet there is
hardly a question more misunderstood, or that has more misapplications.
So manifold are its misconceptions that it has come to
be a byword suitable for every occasion. For instance, if
when in company, one should wish to scramble out of
an embarrassing situation, or his more fortunate brother should wish

(11:30):
to be considered witty, all that either would have to
do would be to mention woman's suffrage, and they may
be sure of laughter and merriment in response. That essay
is definitely a product of its time. While Lee was
incredibly progressive and a lot of ways She also insisted
that equality had to include Christianity, and that, of course,

(11:51):
is very outdated by today's standards. But her larger message,
which she would reiterate throughout her activism, was that excluding
women in from positions of equality was cutting off a
resource that would benefit everyone. Quote I cannot too strongly
impress upon the reader the importance of this consideration for

(12:11):
the feministic movement is not one for privileges to women,
but one for the requirement of women to be worthy
citizens and contribute their share to the steady progress of
our country toward prosperity and national greatness. In nineteen fifteen,
maybel Lee wrote a speech which is also one of
her famous works that's titled The Submerged Half. And this

(12:35):
was a plea to China for better education for girls
and for women to have a greater role in civic issues,
because even though many of them had the right to vote,
they still weren't considered equal. And this speech opened with quote,
I plead for a wider sphere of usefulness for the
long submerged women of China. I ask for our girls
the open door to the treasury of knowledge, the same

(12:58):
opportunities for physical develop mint as boys, and the same
rights of participation in all human activities of which they
are individually capable. She makes the case in her speech
that women have long been significant contributors to China's history.
Quote any picture showing the condition of Chinese women throughout

(13:18):
the bygone past, though dark in the main, must be
a moving picture to be strictly truthful. Glimpses of light
run through every scene. Women of learning, women versed in statecraft,
women of commanding intellect, and heroines and every walk of
life emerged from cramping surroundings and played their parts in

(13:38):
the long drama of Chinese history. She definitely had a
way with words, and I especially love that passage. Um.
I love her discussion of contrasting of light and dark.
There and as that speech ends, Lee summarizes her position,
stating that keeping the country's women from education and opportunity
is going to hamper its development and its Asian in

(14:00):
the world, writing quote, the welfare of China, and possibly
it's very existence as an independent nation, depends on rendering
tardy justice to its womankind. For no nation can ever
make real and lasting progress in civilization unless it's women
are following close to its men, if not actually abreast
with them in the fierce struggle for existence among the nations,

(14:24):
that nation is badly handicapped, which leaves undeveloped one half
of its intellectual and moral resources. In nineteen sixteen, Mabel
Lee sought the presidency of the Chinese Students Association. This
was a case where she was campaigning against a male student,
since the c s A was an organization that included
both women from Barnard and men from Colombia. Mabel didn't win,

(14:48):
though there was some concern that her victorious opponent TV
Sung may have manipulated the ballots. Yeah, we don't know
for sure, and at this point any evidence of that
is long gone, but it's definitely something that comes up
in examinations of this period of her life. And speaking
of ballots, in nineteen seventeen, New York had a constitutional

(15:10):
amendment on its ballot for the November sixth election that,
if passed, would grant women the right to vote in
the state constitution. Votes in favor of the amendment one
with fifty three point nine two percent of the vote,
and this made New York the first state to secure
the vote for women, and it was a key part
of the strategy of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association.

(15:33):
They were essentially counting on New York to jump start
this movement and hoping it would roll through other states. Also,
in nineteen seventeen, Mabel received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to
continue her studies. So for some quick background on what
that was and the multiple factors in play there. The
Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two had been extended

(15:55):
by the Geary Act of eighteen ninety two, and then
that extension was made permanent in nineteen o two, when
the US and seven other nations had sent troops to
China to put an end to the Boxer rebellion in
nineteen hundred. Their terms included that China had to pay
out an indemnity to each nation over the course of

(16:16):
the next several decades. It turned out that the United
States was actually overpaid in this deal, so the United
States and China started negotiating. This is a tricky situation.
The US was dealing with the economic consequences of ongoing
tensions with China. In May of nine eight, after a
long period of discussion, the US Congress passed a bill

(16:40):
that enabled China to set up a scholarship fund with
that overpayment that became the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, and then
under this program, Chinese students could attend schools in the
United States. That is the most broad strokes way I
could kind of put that together in this outline. There
of course a million news and subtleties and aspects of it,

(17:02):
and long discussions of Theodore Roosevelt and his behavior and
all of it that are tied to this. But that's
just to give you a little setup on what this
scholarship was, because it gets reference in relation to Maybe
Lee a lot, and there's not always a good explanation
of exactly what it was. But the inclusion in this
scholarship program is a detail about Mabel Lee's life that

(17:25):
often gets a little bit confusing when you read various
different biographies, because some of them get it wrong. You'll
sometimes see it reported that she received the scholarship as
part of her move with her mother to the United States.
That's not the case. She was still a child then,
and this was a scholarship for higher learnings, so that
doesn't make any sense. Additionally, that scholarship did not exist

(17:50):
yet in nine five when she moved to New York.
She had been allowed to move from China because there
were provisions within the Chinese Exclusion Act that allowed teachers,
more Chints, diplomats, and missionaries to travel to the US
to live, so she was here under that. It was
not until she went to graduate studies that she got
the Boxer Indemnity scholarship. There was, though to be clear

(18:11):
for her and her mother to move here with her father.
A lot of paperwork involved in securing that permission, but
it was not tied to the scholarship at all. With
her funding in place, Mabel enrolled at Columbia University to
study economics. She was the first Chinese woman to earn
her pH d in economics there. Then she published The

(18:32):
Economic History of China in nine one. As she was
in the middle of her graduate studies, women won the
right to vote in the United States through the nineteenth
Amendment to the U s Constitution, which was passed by
Congress on June four, nine, nineteen, and then ratified on
August eighth. N Yeah, we have talked about that man

(18:52):
so many times. Uh. This was of course a huge victory.
But it's important to note that throughout all of this.
None of that work that Mabel Lee did for the
suffrage movement was going to enable her to vote in
the US. She couldn't even become a citizen at that
point because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and she was
not the only Chinese woman who advocated for the rights

(19:13):
of women to vote in the US, but she did
become one of the most visible in New York. It's
worth noting that the Chinese Exclusion Act remained in place
until nineteen forty three. She was also planning to return
to China, so she may not have been especially interested
in getting US citizenship. Her dream was to open a
school for girls in the country of her birth. As

(19:36):
we mentioned regarding voting rights. In nineteen eleven, imperial rule
in China ended when the Chang dynasty was overthrown. That
shift had been part of her impetus to develop a
plan to become educated herself, and then she wanted to
share that education with Chinese women. She had seen how
the so called old ways had prevented her mother from

(19:56):
getting an education, and she wanted to offer a different
life path after the next generation. But then a tragedy
in her family really changed the trajectory of her life,
and we'll talk about that. But even before the event
they really cemented Mabel Wei's life in New York took place.
Something else happened that seemed to shift her intention away

(20:17):
from education, at least for a little while. She had,
according to a Metropolitan Baptist bulletin that was released in ninet,
gone to China to meet with leadership at the University
of Amoy today known as Yaoman University. That meeting took
place sometime in ninety four. Her trip to China started

(20:38):
in twenty three and ended in twenty four, and it's
not clear what her schedule was like in terms of
this meeting. But according to that right up, which I
will note I did not access directly, I am working
from footnotes in a paper about Lee, she was offered
a job as dean of women at the university, but
she turned that job down. It's not totally clear why

(20:59):
she would do. This was essentially exactly what she had
been working towards. However, as we have discussed on the
show before, China was in the midst of a lot
of upheaval during this time due to famine as well
as political and social unrest. All of which is kind
of interlocking and related. The decision to decline that offer

(21:19):
may have been as simple as just avoiding risk. So
she returned to New York and she appears to have
started working with an export business that was based in
Hong Kong. It is entirely possible that her intent was
to spend some period of time back in the States
earning money. Remember, she had a PhD at this point,
so she was able to command a pretty good salary, uh,

(21:40):
and then do that for a while before returning to
China full time at some point in the future. But
that's all still pretty speculative. We don't really have any
of her personal thoughts on the matter. Yeah, and in
ninety four, Mabel's father, Leto, died suddenly after a heart
attack or a stroke, and as death has its own
more surrounding it. Since his early days working in Chinatown,

(22:02):
Mabel's father had worked really hard to try to reduce
the crime in the neighborhood. There was violence among the
loring Tongs in the city was trying to deal with that,
and according to several accounts, on the night of November twenty,
Reverend Lee had invited the leaders of two of these
rival groups to dinner to try to facilitate negotiations with them,

(22:26):
but this discussion became increasingly contentious, and Mabel's father died
on the spot. Yeah the prevailing opinion is that he
became so upset that it it catalyzed whatever this event
was that killed him. Mabel immediately stepped into the roles
that he had left vacant in his death, first as

(22:46):
her mother's caretaker and also as leader of his church.
She was not officially recognized as her father's successor until
five weeks later, when the American Baptist Home Mission Society
and the New York City Baptist Missions Society appointed her
as mission director. So Lee's life may have switched paths
at this point, but her activism remained, just with a

(23:09):
different focus. When she inherited her father's work, she immediately
started to look at how she could move the mission
and its community forward. Her father had, as his work
with various groups and conflict indicates, done a lot of
work to galvanize Chinatown. He was deeply respected for it.
He had amassed a lot of trust in the community,

(23:30):
and he had also become really influential, and Mabel Lee
was not about to squander that hard earned family reputation.
One of the biggest problems that she saw immediately upon
assuming her father's work was that there was a little
bit of a transient aspect to his mission. The Chinatown
Mission had always rented space. It did not have a

(23:50):
permanent address of its own, so she started to create
a plan to change that. Mabel worked closely with the
executive secretary of the New York City Baptist Mission Society.
That was Dr Charles H. Sears, who studied and wrote
extensively during his lifetime about the benefits of community churches
in cities, and together Sears in Lee launched a fundraising

(24:12):
campaign that was able to raise enough money for the
mission to purchase its own building. It appears that Mabel
initially envisioned this project as something she could do as
a transitional leader for the church. Unlike her father, she
hadn't gone to theology school. She didn't see herself as
a minister. She saw herself really as a social activist,

(24:33):
which had been the draw of a real estate project.
She felt that in giving the mission a permanent home,
she was creating not just a religious center, but also
a place where the church could offer social services and
help the community in a variety of ways. She had
a three year plan to serve in her role as
director through fundraising, purchase, groundbreaking, and opening of the building,

(24:55):
and then she thought she would go back to China
and have a career in women's education. Coming up, we
will discuss Maybe Lee's efforts to retain the church congregation's
Chinese identity while actually still trying to extricate herself from
a life that she had not anticipated, And we will
cover all of that after we hear from the sponsors
that keep stuff you missed in history class going. Because

(25:26):
the mission was part of Chinatown, the members of the
church were still very concerned about the events that were
taking place in China, and Maybe Lee shared her thoughts
on the matter with the congregation through her most comfortable
means of communication, her writing. She wrote newsletters that circulated
to the membership discussing current events as Chinatown watched the

(25:47):
anti imperialist movement in China from across the globe. To Mabel,
this really seemed like a chance for Christianity to become
the way forward for China, and the newsletter she released
six months into her time at the Chinatown mission. She
spread plenty of blame around for the situation that China
was facing. She attributed the issues of the country to

(26:07):
Western nations and to the old regime for clinging to
power through any means necessary, as well as to Chinese
citizens who had lost sight of caring for one another
in favor of pursuing wealth. She believed very strongly that
Christian faith was the best way to heal the country,
and the fault couldn't be placed in any one spot.
The people of China had to be willing to acknowledge

(26:30):
their own problems. She wrote, quote, it is not the
nationality which counts. Not all Chinese are to be trusted,
and not all foreigners are anxious to crush us. We
have many foreign friends who are very anxious to help
us win our rights. The difference lies in the fact
that they have Christianity in their hearts. Christianity is the
salvation of China and the salvation of the whole world.

(26:52):
She definitely had a very narrow view of how the
future should look. Um Though Maybee may have intended to
one day move back to China, Kina, that was still
not going to be how things played out. She stayed
in New York when the building that housed the first
Chinese Baptist Church of New York City was completed. Although
we don't have an entirely clear sense of what led
to that decision, but there were plenty of things that

(27:15):
would have contributed. We already mentioned the upheaval going on
in China, and that was ongoing, and in the US
there was also a degree of backlash to the success
of the movement to gain the right to vote for women.
So even though Mabel Lee was not directly benefiting from
the nineteenth Amendment, she did still get the same negative
response from detractors as anyone else who had fought for

(27:36):
the cause, particularly considering that she had been one of
the figureheads in the press. Trying to find a job
in the US was going to be incredibly difficult for
a Chinese woman, no matter how accomplished and educated she was.
Aside from the fact that she was associated with a
movement that not everybody liked, she was also a foreigner
and racism was a factor. So maybe Lee's decision to

(27:59):
stay at the mission may have kind of boiled down
to just seeing it is perhaps the only way she
could continue to earn a living in a job that
was meaningful to her. But even getting to the point
where the new building was up and running had been
a long and arduous path that had gotten Mabel even
more deeply rooted in New York. For one, the initial

(28:20):
fundraising campaign had enabled the purchase of a building at
twenty one Pell Street, but there were a lot of
problems with the space. Was going to cost a lot
more to get it renovated to the point that it
could be usable, and that meant finding another place. That
led to the purchase of a second property, which was
a Chinese restaurant on Mott Street. There's actually a story

(28:41):
there that that is actually the restaurant where her father died.
Mabel actually found a patron through her connections who could
give enough money to make this financial move. That also
meant that a stock company had to be set up,
something Mabel also did. The stock company purchased the restaurant,
which was believed to be a better building for setting
up the church, But then the Great Depression hit before

(29:04):
the Pell Street location had been sold, so then there
were two properties that were losing value. Mabel Lee, who
had family money and assets, seized this opportunity and offered
to buy the Pell Street location from the Baptist City
Mission Society with the intent that the title would be
transferred to the Chinese church. This actually took a really

(29:25):
long time because the city's Baptist organization went back on
the deal. Lee kept working on the properties needed upgrades,
and it was finally settled as a Chinese Baptist church
in nineteen thirty six, though the New York City Baptist
Mission Society still technically owned it and would continue to
own it until Mabel was finally able to have the
title fully transferred to the church, and didn't happen until

(29:48):
nineteen fifty four. But even by the early nineteen thirties,
so much of Mabel Lee's life and finances were tied
to the church that it's really not surprising that she stayed,
although she did em conflicted about it. Yeah. She famously
one of her friends, who was a well known intellectual
at the time, kind of made some comments about like,

(30:09):
is this what you're going to do with your life? Um,
and she really did struggle. The following year, n seven,
Mabel went to China on a third and last trip
back that she made as an adult. She might have
once again been considering taking a job there. According to
travel documents, she returned to the US, entering through port

(30:30):
at Seattle on June seven, less than two weeks before
Japan invaded China and set off the Second Sino Japanese War.
If Mabel had been considering a return to Asia before
that event, any thoughts were surely cut short at that point,
and from then on she remained entirely dedicated to the church,

(30:51):
almost to the exclusion of everything else in her life.
This is a good time to note that Lee certainly
had admirers over the years, but she never married, and
accounts of her life don't really even mention any serious relationships.
This is interesting, and that in her teen years she
had spoken really publicly about the importance of education for
girls as part of preparing them to be good wives,

(31:13):
but she didn't choose to become a wife herself. We
don't know if she consciously came to the conclusion that
it wasn't in line with her goals for herself, or
if she just didn't care for any of the prospective
suitors who presented themselves to her. Mystery, we don't really
know her years as the church's minister, though we're not
exactly easy for may Belee. Although she saw things very

(31:37):
clearly in terms of what she thought was best, there
were plenty of Chinese residents of New York who did
not want to convert to Christianity, and they did not
see Christianity as a solution to anything. Additionally, she was
living in a country that, while largely Christian, had its
own disagreements between factions of the Christian faith, and Mabel

(31:58):
worried that Chinese Christians were pretty too dependent on White
Christianity for leadership, as evidenced by that issue of property titles.
She wanted to see a new Chinese Christianity which would
not be beholden to the New York City Baptist Missionary Society,
one that could self govern with an understanding of the
ways in which Chinatown and its residents were unique. But

(32:21):
this ideology led to its own problems. For one, it
meant that its mission was on its own. It was
unwilling to combine or unify with the other churches of
the city. Then, for younger members of the church who
had been born in New York and felt like that
was a large part of their identity, a church so
dedicated to the identity of first generation immigrants didn't seem

(32:43):
like the right fit. The congregation started to shrink by
the early nineteen forties. Some people saw mabel Leah's stubborn
to the detriment of her own cause, and according to
letters exchanged between Baptist leaders in New York at the time,
quote nothing could ever persuade doctor Lee to enter into
cooperation with anybody. The congregation numbers kept diminishing, with some

(33:07):
members of the congregation moving away to other cities, and
then in World War Two, young men from first Chinese
Baptist left for the war effort. Throughout all of this,
maybe Lee had continued her social programs through the church,
going all the way back to the nineteen twenties. She
and her mother had fundraised together to send aid to
the people of China who had been most impacted by

(33:27):
the famine. She worked on youth program She sent students
to college. She worked on various projects to support the
neighborhood and its residence. She had founded the Chinese Christian
Center in the church building on Pell Street, and through
that she was able to provide a health clinic and
a kindergarten to Chinatown's residents. As well as English language instruction.

(33:49):
But though she had put a lot of effort into
the church, particularly getting it to a point of independence.
Once she had achieved that milestone, her congregation had largely dissipated.
Maybe Lee remained and kept the church going though for
the remainder of her life. Mabel Lee died in New
York in nineteen sixty six. It's not clear if she
ever became a US citizen or whether she ever voted

(34:12):
in the US. On December two, Manhattan's Chinatown post office,
located at six Doyers Street, was named the Maybe Lee
Memorial Post Office. At the dedication ceremony, Senior Associate Dean
of Students at Barnard Christian Kansu said of Maybe Lee quote,
she was fearless and selfless in her efforts as a
suffragette advocating for women's voting rights, even though those very

(34:35):
rights would exclude her as a Chinese immigrant. She understood
that equality of opportunity was essential and that someday that
opportunity would extend to the Chinese American community as well.
I really was excited to talk about her because she
is an example. Whether you align with all of her
beliefs or not of a person who was not about

(34:59):
herself her advocacy, like it didn't need to impact her
for her to see something as important and worth doing
if it helps somebody else, which something that's a little
harder to come by sometimes. Uh, And I think we
should all be reminded that that is an important value
in our It's hard, I understand, but she's great for

(35:21):
that reason. Do you have a listener mail before we
close out? I have a couple of pieces, um. One
is one that you brought to my attention from Facebook.
It is about theta Bara from our listener Heather, who
said love the pot in the episode, but curious as
to why there was no mention of Barra being Jewish.
I have the easy answer, sort of, which is that

(35:42):
she was Jewish, she never really practiced, and in the
biographies I read that's kind of what they said, um,
which felt a little like anemic to include episode well,
and some aspects of her life seem like they have
a different read with that piece of the context, like

(36:02):
like the name changes. Uh, if that was a factor
trying to move away from a name that might be
more like that plays a part right, but still some
question marks. Yeah, I mean, one of the one of
the big biographies that's very popular about her literally says this,

(36:24):
she did have her butt mitzvah uh, and it says
the and the never very religious, was always proud of
her heritage, but it never seemed to come up again ever.
So I was like, how so I don't have the answer.
The other thing that was really interesting and kind of
led me to be like, I don't know of a
way to say this that does it just sound like

(36:45):
lip service to acknowledging it is that in the National
Jewish Women's Archive biography of her, they don't mention her
religion at all. She's just included. Um So it got
to be a little bit tricky, But I apologize as
if to anybody that felt like we were down playing
that as a moment of representation for Jewish identity on

(37:06):
the show. It just it seemed so secondary to her
life that I felt like it was shoehorning it to
put it in because she never seemed to say much
about it or well so that's why, um I did
also want a point. We got so much good great
Theda Bara Male, one of which is just two photographs,
and I feel like such a ding Dong for never

(37:28):
having made this connection. Uh. This is from our listener, Am,
and the only thing she wrote was male Fantasies Unchanged
in sixty years. And it is a picture of Theda
Barra in Cleopatra where she is wearing this metal I
wouldn't even call it a bikini because it's just like
a cover for her breasts. And then it's a picture

(37:51):
of Princess Leia in the Hut Slayer outfit, which looks
almost exactly like it. Ye, I Star Wars dork. Extraordinary
that I am have ever made that connection, even though
I love Theda Bara and I like Star Wars never once,
never once, And you have opened my eyes in a
brand new way, um, for which totally grateful. I feel

(38:15):
so foolish for never having noticed h But now it's
all I'm going to see. Um. And just to be
on theme, we'll talk about another reference to Theda Bara
in my world, although I have an excuse for this
one that I never knew about. This is from our

(38:37):
listener John, who writes, Hello, Theda Bara has an unusual
legacy and that she is the namesake for one of
the bears in Disney's Country Bear Jamboree at the Magic Kingdom.
The bear that descends from the ceiling on a swing
and sings is named Teddy bearra. I knew that Teddy's
name was a pun referencing a long ago actress, but
I didn't know anything about Theda until I listened to

(38:59):
the podcast. Country Bear Jamboree was one of the last
projects while Disney was involved in before his death. Maybe
he or one of the imagineers was a fan of
thet is um. John also includes pictures of his non
human family members, Pee could Be, the cat who was
no longer with us but was adorable, and the very

(39:21):
much alive Skittles, the Chihuahua toy poodle makes wholely moses,
that's cute dog. Okay uh, He writes, I usually listen
to the podcast while walking Skittles early in the morning.
Thanks for always having interesting and varied content. I've been
listening for many years. I always assume. Now I will
say two things. I always assumed that Teddy bearrow was
just because that bear is supposed to be sort of

(39:42):
cute and sweet and cuddly. But it makes more sense
that it is a reference to Theda. Bara. Actually also,
I don't love the Country Bearsamber. I find those bears
slightly frightening. So I have only been a partaker of
that particular entertainment maybe three times in my life, So
I'm gonna beg out with that one. But now we

(40:03):
have two evidences of me being a dangling and not
recognizing connections, which is great. If you would like to
write to us and tell me another thing I've missed
that's connected to Disney or Star Wars knock yourself out,
you can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also find us on social media
as a missed in History and if you have not

(40:24):
yet subscribed to the show that is easiest Pie you
can do it on the i heeart radio app or
anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

(40:45):
your favorite shows.

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