Mabel Ping-Hua Lee
The first woman to receive a PhD. from Columbia University. Even after the passage of the 19th amendment, Lee was unable to vote because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 until it was repealed years later. She became a well-known figure in the women's suffrage movement and rode horseback in the 1912 New York pro-suffrage parade.
She said in an article she authored, "We believe in the idea of democracy; woman suffrage or the feminist movement (of which woman suffrage is a fourth part) is the application of democracy to women... The fundamental principle of democracy is equality of opportunity... It means an equal chance for each man to show what his merits are... the feminists want nothing more than the equality of opportunity for women to prove their merits and what they are best suited to do."