With the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, 26 million adult female Americans gained the right to vote. However, racial prejudice granted citizenship and its full benefits to White women, only. For most women of color, Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) women among them, electoral equality was decades away. It wasn’t until 1975, when the minority languages provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, that most AAPI women gained access to the ballot.
Starting with the first wave of Chinese immigrants to the continental US during the 1848 California Gold Rush, AAPI women have fought for citizenship rights, faced gender discrimination and grappled with persistent negative stereotypes, often branded as disease carriers, exotic, promiscuous, prostitutes, and deemed unwilling to assimilate into “American” culture, thus perceived as “perpetual foreigners.”
After the Civil War, despite the provision of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” U.S. nativists objected to granting birthright citizenship to children of Chinese ancestry born in the U.S., and later to U.S. born Japanese Americans (Nisei).
While the 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, opened voting rights to all native-born American men, racial prejudice and Jim Crow Laws prevented men of color, including the few Asian American men who were citizens, from exercising their citizenship right to vote through literacy tests, property restrictions, and voter intimidation.
Following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, primarily constructed by Chinese immigrant laborers, growing anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in The Page Act of 1875. The first restrictive federal immigration law, it was designed to curb Asian immigrants, banning unfree Asian laborers (“coolies”) and women for “immoral purposes.” Although purportedly addressing human trafficking and prostitution, it targeted Chinese women, viewing them as prostitutes and effectively barring them from entering the US.
Seven years later, during the rise of eugenics, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricted immigration of an entire group of people based on race and class, a first in US immigration law. It banned Chinese men and women from entering the U.S. for nearly 60 years, except those who were merchants, teachers, students, diplomats, and tourists. Married women’s ability to immigrate was based on their husbands’ status. Single women found it nearly impossible to enter the US, assumed to be prostitutes or to be sold into prostitution.
Then, in 1898, citizenship for children born in the US to Asian immigrants became possible when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) that children born in the United States, even to parents who were not eligible to become citizens, were still citizens under the 14th Amendment.
While women born in the US to Asian parents were now US citizens, they, like all other American women, still could not vote. Like many women of Asian background – citizens and non-citizens – Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett joined the lengthy and arduous fight for the right to vote that led to the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920.
Born October 7, 1897, in Guangzhou, China, Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee’s (1897-1966) family immigrated to New York City in 1905, living in a tenement at 53 Bayard Street in Chinatown.
Despite being ineligible to become a citizen, thus vote, at a young age, Lee became a major force within the suffrage movement. She drew crowds for her speeches, and her public appearances were covered by the New York Times, the New York Tribune, and the Sun. In 1912, at the age of 15, Lee led a major suffragist parade in New York City, drawing nearly ten thousand participants.
While enrolled in Barnard College, martriculating in 1913, where she excelled in English, Latin, and mathematic, Lee was active in the Chinese Students’ Association for which she wrote feminist essays, including “The Meaning of Woman Suffrage” (1914), advocating for women’s voting rights and equal opportunities.
In 1916, she spoke at the Women’s Political Union’s Suffrage Shop, emphasizing education and civic participation for Chinese women. And, In 1917, as a Women’s Political Equality League member, she led Chinese and Chinese-American women in a parade down Fifth Avenue
After graduating from Barnard, Lee earned a master’s degree in educational administration from Columbia Teachers College and became the first Chinese woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1921.
While her goal was to return to China and promote education equality for women, when her father died, Lee assumed his position as director of New York City’s First Chinese Baptist Church. In this position, she focused her attention on supporting and advocating for the local Chinese American community.
In the Kingdom of Hawaii, in 1861, Wilhelmine Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett (1861-1929) was born to an interracial couple – a German father and Native Hawaiian mother– of the Hawaiian wealthy and political class. Wilhelmine solidified her position in Hawaiian society in 1888 when she married English businessman John McKibbin Dowsett who became the largest shareholder in the Waianae Sugar Company, and later served as a Republican Senator in the Hawaii Territorial Legislature from 1905 to 1907.
In 1893, after a few decades of political turmoil in the Hawaiian Kingdom, the European and American business class, joined by descendants of Protestant missionaries, overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani, establishing a provisional government that stripped Hawaiian women of political power and the right to vote. By April 1900, the US had annexed Hawaii and established it as a US Territory governed by the Hawaiian Organic Act. Unlike most other state constitutions, it specifically forbade the new territorial legislature from granting suffrage contrary to the federal constitution.
Incensed, wealthy women of Native Hawaiian and biracial descent like Dowsett, Emma Ahuena Davison Taylor and Emma Nāwahī began their fight to regain the right to vote. However, most women of Euro-American descent, the “missionary set,” concerned about the increased enfranchisement of non-white female voters declined to support women’s suffrage.
By 1912, Dowsett, now a suffragist leader, founded the Women’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai’i (WESAH), Hawaii’s first local suffrage club, and affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1913. With the help of suffragists on the mainland, in 1918 Dowsett and the WESAH successfully persuaded President Wilson to sign a US Congressional bill granting the Hawaiian Territorial Legislature the right to decide for itself the matter of women’s suffrage.
The WESAH won a milestone in the fight on March 4, 1919. Pressured by hundreds of women gathered at the Hawaii Capitol, the Hawaiian Senate passed an equal suffrage bill. Nevertheless, the White male legislators dominating the Hawaiian House, worried that women’s suffrage would lead to Native Hawaiians re-claiming political power, proposed a voter referendum. Dowsett organized another demonstration of nearly 500 women, prompting a hearing on the matter in the Hawaiian statehouse. Despite the WESAH’s efforts, by April 1919, all suffrage bills were dead.
Undeterred, Dowsett continued her work with WESAH, lobbying for women’s suffrage until the 19th Amendment to the US constitution was finally ratified in August 1920. While Hawaiian women could now vote in territorial elections, it wasn’t until Hawaii became a state in 1959 that they could vote in federal elections.
Meanwhile, on the mainland USA, anti-Asian immigration laws not only made it difficult for Asian immigrants to enter and stay in the US, they prevented them from becoming naturalized citizens, thus from voting, until 1952. Nevertheless, voter suppression laws, intimidation tactics and language barriers disenfranchised the Asian American community. Finally, in 1975, with passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and the addition of Section 203 mandating bilingual election materials in areas with a high concentration of non-English-speaking voters, Asian Americans gained the ability to vote and the Asian American community won access to political power.
Today, as a result of the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, access to the vote is once again under attack. Since that ruling, many states have passed laws increasing barriers to voting, disproportionately disenfranchising low-income voters with erratic hours and multiple jobs, and voters of color.
According to a May 2024 Pew Research Center study, over the past two decades Asian Americans have been the fastest-growing group of eligible voters in the U.S. The 2022 Asian American Voter Survey found that about half preferred mail-in or drop-off voting. In response, states in which the AAPI population could affect election results, such as Texas and Georgia, have passed voter suppression laws.
Texas, with the third-highest eligible AAPI voter population, enacted one of the nation’s most restrictive election laws in 2021. ID requirements have complicated the absentee ballot process, leading to thousands of rejected ballots in the first election under the new law. Other restrictive measures– limits on who can assist with ballot returns, reduced polling places, limited early voting, and a more difficult voter registration process.
In Georgia, with 328,000 eligible AAPI voters, 4.4% of all eligible voters, a recent law complicates mail-in voting, reduces ballot drop boxes, and bans providing refreshments to people in long polling lines. With President Joe Biden winning Georgia by only 11,779 votes in 2020, the influence of Georgia’s Asian voters, many of whom are first-time and unaffiliated voters, is more significant than ever.
Among Asian American women, since 2020, when Trump administration officials branded Covid-19 the “China virus” and “kung flu,” over half report being discriminated against and harassed. Many, fearing, or who have been victims of violence, are now reluctant to engage in civic activities, such as voting.
Others, inspired by Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, Wilhelmine Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett, and other Asian American women activists omitted from history books, are determined to build Asian women’s power. They are engaging in GOTV efforts and fighting against voter suppression laws. They are participating in the ongoing effort to achieve true democracy for all American women.
For more information on women’s right to vote, See Stand UP, Speak OUT Docuseries , Episode 2: Voting Rights
