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Volume 7, No. 6
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June 2020
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How WWHP Fulfills Its Mission During These Challenging Times
Working Women's History Project grieves for the loss of life and livelihoods caused by Covid-19. Working people, especially working people of color, bear the brunt of those losses. Along with the rest of the world, we now also grieve the completely unnecessary loss of George Floyd's life as well as the lives of
Trayvon Martin
,
Tamir Rice
,
Michael Brown
,
Eric Garner
,
Philando Castile
,
Breonna Taylor
, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others.
WWHP is committed to racial and economic justice, and, like our sisters and brothers in the SEIU, "We know that until Black communities and other communities of color can thrive, none of our communities can truly thrive."
Unlike SEIU and other advocacy organizations, WWHP is an educational organization with a mission to preserve and promote the stories of historical and living Chicago women who have made contributions toward achieving social justice and equality.
WWHP has told the stories of women who:
- supported the right of workers to organize--for a decent wage, for healthcare and other benefits, for gender equity, for fairness on the job.
- fought to keep nurses in Chicago Public Schools.
- fought for pensions for teachers and services and resources for retired people.
- worked to have affordable and quality child care available to all families.
- worked for women's suffrage, especially Black and Brown women whose efforts for suffrage had been largely overlooked.
WWHP pledges to continue to seek out and tell those stories and to provide a
platform for working women of all races, ethnicities, creeds, and classes to tell their own stories.
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We Shall Rise May Day Birthday Celebration for Mother Jones
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| Brigid Duffy as Mother Jones |
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On May Day 2020, Working Women's History Project joined the Mother Jones Heritage Project with Ireland's ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall; Brian O'Brien and Sarah Keating
of
the Consulate General of Ireland in
Chicago
; Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA; and Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers of America to honor Mother Jones on her May Day Birthday via a socially distanced zoom event.
WWHP's very own Brigid Duffy made Mother Jones come alive, performing excerpts from the Autobiography of Mother Jones. Sara Nelson spoke of Mother Jones's wisdom and showed how relevant her fight was in the struggle of "essential" workers for safe working conditions and a living and secure wage, which are all under attack during this pandemic. Nelson urged us not to forget the lessons that Mother Jones gave us. As Mother Jones said, "The future is in Labor's strong rough hands."
For more information see Brigid Duffy as Mother Jones
Sara Nelson
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Susan B. Anthony on Trial:
Woman Prosecuted For Daring to Vote
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| Engraved by G.E. Perine Co., NY |
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June 17, 1873 was the day Susan B. Anthony went on trial for voting illegally in Rochester, New York. She had voted in the presidential election with fourteen other women. All were arrested, but Anthony was the only one to be indicted and put on trial for voting because she was a woman. She believed the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave all citizens the right to vote. As a woman, she was ruled incompetent to testify in her own defense. Her attorney was Henry R. Selden, a respected local lawyer who agreed to take her case. Selden argued in court that women were citizens and entitled to all the rights of citizens including the right to vote.
The trial was complicated and widely publicized. Judge Ward Hunt did not allow the jurors to discuss the case United States v. Susan B. Anthony in the federal circuit court where the trial was held. He directed the jurors to find her guilty. On the last day of the trial Anthony was finally permitted to speak. She ignored the judge's order to stop speaking and continued to deliver what some believe was the most famous speech in history calling for women's suffrage. She accused the judge of ignoring her natural rights, civil rights, political rights and judicial rights. She said she was robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship: "I am degraded from the status of citizen to that of a subject, and not only myself individually, but all of my sex..."
The judge sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100 which she declared she would never pay and she never did. He did not order her to be taken into custody because then she could appeal her case to the Supreme Court.
A year after the trial, Anthony published a book containing documents from her trial. A month after Judge Hunt retired, another circuit court judge ruled that a judge could not direct a jury to deliver a verdict of guilty and this was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1895. Susan B. Anthony's trial helped make women's fight for the right to vote to become a national issue and propelled the women's rights movement to make women's suffrage a priority.
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Mabel Ping-Hua Lee:
Fought for Women's Suffrage
Even While Barred From U.S. Citizenship
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| Photo credit: NextShark |
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Born in Canton, now Guangzhou, China (some sources say 1896, others say 1897), Mabel
Ping-Hua Lee immigrated as a child to the United States to join her father, a Baptist pastor, in New York City. She had been awarded a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, which enabled her to secure a U.S. visa to study in this country. She came during the era in which the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was in effect, which barred Chinese immigrants from attaining United States citizenship, and therefore, from voting. Nevertheless, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee became involved in the movement for women's suffrage at an early age, even though she herself was unlikely to benefit from the enfranchisement of women.
While still in her teens as a student at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, Lee led a suffrage parade on horseback, attended by approximately 10,000 people, down Fifth Avenue in 1912. Later, as a student at Barnard College, she joined the Chinese Students Association, and wrote essays for The Chinese Students' Monthly. In her 1914 essay, The Meaning of Women's Suffrage, she wrote of the importance of voting rights and equality for women. Over a year later, she gave a speech before the Women's Political Union's Suffrage Shop, titled "The Submerged Half," in which she discussed the education and civic participation of Chinese women. In 1917, Lee led Chinese American women in another march for women's suffrage down Fifth Avenue. That year, women in New York State won the right to vote.
In 1920, women across the country had achieved voting rights, but Lee and many other women of color were unable to exercise those rights.
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee graduated from Barnard College, and went on to earn a master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1921. She was the first Chinese woman to earn such a degree. After her father's death, Lee became the director of the First Chinese Baptist Church of New York City. She also opened the Chinese Christian Center, which offered a health clinic, a kindergarten, vocational training and English classes.
In 1943, Chinese immigrants were able to become U.S. citizens, but according to the National Women's History Museum and the National Park Service records, it is not known if Mabel Ping-Hua Lee ever became a U.S. citizen or voted. However, her activism in support of women's suffrage helped to make voting rights a reality for many other women.
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee died in 1966. In July 2018, Congress authorized the renaming of a post office in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan. It is now named in honor of Mabel Lee.
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Working Women's History Project
Please contact us through Amy Laiken
312-402-4188
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