Within the long struggle for women’s rights, the politics of American imperialism often intersected with calls for suffrage. As historian Kristin Hoganson has demonstrated, suffrage leaders like Mary Livermore made their appeals by noting that American women were, scandalously, “as badly off as Filipinos” by being excluded from the U.S. electorate. Suffragists advocated for women’s rights in overseas territories like Hawai’i, even claiming at times that colonized women were more fit for the franchise than colonized men.
Meanwhile, for women under American colonial rule, the goals of national sovereignty and equal suffrage were entwined. They hoped this would lead to support from mainland American suffragists. For instance, when Clemencia López addressed the New England Woman Suffrage Association in Boston in 1902, she boldly declared, “I believe that we are both striving for much the same object—you for the right to take part in national life; we for the right to have a national life to take part in. And I am sure that, if we understood each other better, the differences which now exist between your country and mine would soon disappear.” The Woman’s Journal published López’s speech, amplifying her invitation for greater mutual understanding. In 1911, Carrie Chapman Catt traveled to the Philippines, to promote women’s suffrage there. Yet suffragists did not regularly champion colonial independence; rather, many positioned themselves as reformers who were vital to governing empire in a benevolent fashion.
We should not reduce the history of American women’s suffrage to the attitudes of white women on the mainland. Colonized women were not the passive recipients of an imperialist American suffrage movement. While they sometimes sought tactical alliances with North American feminists, colonial women in the Caribbean and Pacific organized their own associations and movements to demand and win their own enfranchisement. Even in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where a court decision extended suffrage to women, the ruling was the culmination of strategic activism by St. Thomian suffragists including Ella Gifft, Edith Williams, Anna Vessup and Eulalie Stevens. Williams, Vessup, and Stevens were all teachers who had spent time in African American communities in the mainland United States and applied lessons learned about judicial power over enfranchisement (and disenfranchisement). In Puerto Rico, calls for women’s suffrage had begun decades earlier with working women like Luisa Capetillo, a cigar factory worker and labor organizer, and Ana Roqué de Duprey, a widowed teacher. Suffrage activism revivified in 1920 when factory worker Genera Pagán attempted to register to vote, and was rejected. Pagán’s experience made clear that, despite the extension of citizenship to Puerto Rico three years earlier, the Nineteenth Amendment would not apply there. New suffrage organizations formed in response, from the socialist, working-class Asociación Feminista Popular to the conservative Liga Social Sufragista. Women’s suffrage victory in Puerto Rico in 1929 resulted from their collective, if often competing, pressure.