Clara Chan Lee was a Chinese-American suffragist, women’s rights activist, and community leader. She was the first Chinese American woman to register to vote in the U.S.
Clara Chan was born October 21, 1886, in Portland, Oregon to Reverend Chan Hon Fun and Ow Muck Gay. The family moved to Oakland at the turn of the twentieth century where her father served as pastor of the Chinese Community Methodist Church in Oakland Chinatown from 1900 to 1909. The church was established by the Methodist Chinese Mission movement when Chinese immigrants first arrived in Oakland in the 1850s. Chinese workers migrated to the U.S. to fill the demand for labor in agricultural and factory jobs, the California gold rush, and constructing the intercontinental railroad.
Clara Chan married Charles Goodall Lee, the son of another prominent family at Chinese Community Methodist Church. Charles’s father was a lay leader in the Chinese Methodist movement and later became ordained and served as the pastor of the church. Charles became the first licensed Chinese American dentist in the United States. Like his father, he served as an active lay leader of the Chinese Community Methodist Church.
Patriarchal culture and anti-Chinese sentiment prevented many Chinese women from immigrating. Often those who came had been sold into domestic slavery or prostitution. The Chinese Community Methodist Church was originally established to support schools and help exploited women escape slavery and prostitution. Both Clara and her husband took to heart the Methodist tradition embodied by the Chinese Community Methodist Church – community involvement and working for social justice.
In October of 1911, California become the 6th state to grant women the right to vote with the passage of Proposition 4, nine years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Less than a month later, on November 8, 1911, Clara and her friend Emma Tom Leung, accompanied by their husbands, registered to vote, becoming the first Chinese-American women to register to vote in the United States. Their action inspired other women to break cultural norms and take advantage of the right to participate in the political process.
Chan founded the Chinese Women’s Jeleab (Self-Reliance) Association in 1913, which promoted women’s rights and self-reliance among Chinese women both in the U.S. and China. The association worked to raise the status of women and saw education as key to acquiring freedom, independence and respect.
On Sept. 22, 1913, the Jeleab Association published an article in Chinese World newspaper. “How can men … presume to be superior to women, trampling them underfoot, humiliating them, and making them serve men’s every whim?” it queried. “Before one can be self-reliant, one must have education … If we women are to become independent, we must form a large group so that we can cull and share ideas and benefit from each other … Our goal is to cultivate self-reliance in each of us and furthermore, to promote and propagate this concept in China, so as to strip away the black curtain that has blocked women’s view of the sky for thousands of years.”
The Jeleab Association disbanded after a few years due to geographical barriers which prevented women from meeting together. However, Chan continued her activism working for women’s education and independence through the Chinese YWCA and other community clubs throughout her life.
Clara Chan Lee died in October of 1993 at the age of 106. Her advocacy as a dedicated champion for education and women’s right to self-determination has inspired generations of women after her.
