Mabel Ping-Hua Lee

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 your favorite shows.