This August, Americans celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the 19th Amendment—an anniversary that excludes many Chinese Americans.
While the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, many Asian American women were denied citizenship due to laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
It wasn’t until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act that all Asian Americans could vote. This law allowed people of Asian ancestry to become citizens, thereby giving them the right to vote.
Sixty-eight years later, Asian American political participation still lags. In 2017, 29% of the Quincy population was Asian American. Yet, Asian Americans only made up 16% of the city’s registered voters. This gap reflects two factors: lack of citizenship for many Asian Americans and apathy towards the political process.
Beyond voting, Asian Americans also lack representation among elected officials, a problem that troubles Tiffani Sykhammountry, executive director of the Asian American Women’s Political Initiative (AAWPI).
The AAWPI is a political leadership organization that places young women—from prospective politicos to physical therapy majors—in Massachusetts State House internships to learn about politics and community activism.
Asian Americans make up nearly 7% of Massachusetts’ population, with higher proportions living in Boston and surrounding towns. Yet, when AAWPI was founded in 2009, less than 1% of state legislators across the country were Asian American women.
AAWPI targets women in their political education efforts because of their role in the Asian American Pacific Islander community, often holding collective power and influence.
“We wholeheartedly believe that in order for Asian American women to be more involved, to change what we see as an unreflective system, we need more women in politics.”
Further, to Sykhammountry, this political literacy is especially important to Asian American immigrants or children of immigrants.
“It can be scary for people to enter politics. It’s a difficult system to understand if you’re not born into it,” Sykhammountry, a child of immigrants herself, said. “We have to teach our communities to advocate for ourselves. If the privilege is not utilized, laws will be decided without us.”
“We want to get people into these pipelines. You have to understand the system in order to disrupt it,” Sykhammountry said.
AAWPI aims to equip Asian American women with political knowledge to change whichever field they enter. Following their internship with AAWPI, some alumni make careers out of politics. Others advocate “from the outside” by participating in issue-based advocacy organizations.
This election cycle features a historic representation of women on the ballot, both on the national and local level.
Still, according to Sykhammountry, Asian American voting history should contextualize today’s voting.
“Knowing your history is powerful. Because of the model minority myth and the way we exist in white America, we must learn our history and constantly unpack what we’re told,” Sykhammountry said. “The more people that realize how recently we got the right to vote, the more they don’t take it for granted.”
