My thanks to @SHAFRhistorians for taking #SHAFR2020 virtual! My presentation is titled “Much the Same Object”: Trans-Pacific Women’s Suffrage and Filipino Nationalism." It’s a new research project for me, combining my interests in women & U.S. empire with #suffrage history. 
The #19thA enfranchised women on the U.S. mainland in principle. But voting rights in practice had racialized limits for men & women; many state laws disenfranchised black voters, while the inability to become citizens barred Native Americans & Chinese immigrants from the polls.
The #19thA applied even more unevenly throughout U.S. empire. The Constitution and its Amendments did not apply in the unorganized territory of the Philippines; the U.S. government defined Filipinos as American subjects, not citizens. So women there did not get suffrage in 1920.
Women in the Philippines had long wrestled with their double disenfranchisement as women and as colonial subjects. For them, the goals of national sovereignty & equal suffrage were entwined, as Clemencia López of Balayan made clear in her speech to Boston suffragists in 1902.
Mainland U.S. suffragists liked to represent themselves as a vanguard, awakening other women’s activism around the world. But from the Filipina perspective, mainlanders were potential allies, not catalysts, of suffrage activism and anti-imperialism.
A number of Filipina women created a public platform for themselves on the mainland as authorities on their own culture. Sofia Reyes de Veyra, for one, wrote about the Philippines for metropolitan newspapers & fostered cross-cultural awareness in women’s clubs in Washington DC.
Filipina suffragists actively resisted American imperialist feminism. They effectively argued that they were not unenfranchised like mainland women, but rather disenfranchised. Spanish & American colonialism had taken away the equal status that Filipino women & men once shared.
Filipina suffragists did not associate women’s rights with Western progress; rather, they saw suffrage as a means to restore women’s pre-colonial authority. This appeal to tradition aligned them with anti-colonial Filipino men as they approached full national independence.
Filipina suffragists persuaded key politicians to support #votesforwomen. Filipina women thus developed a trans-Pacific suffrage movement of their own, forging alliances with mainland American suffragists while championing anti-imperialism and Filipino sovereignty.
It’s thus perhaps fitting that Filipina women won equal suffrage through a mass plebiscite in 1937. 90% of over 400k women cast ballots affirming their desire for suffrage. Unlike mainland US women, they enfranchised themselves directly, thru the act of voting.
11/11. Thank you for reading my #SHAFR2020 paper, translated to Twitter! I welcome thoughts & questions in response, and I’d enjoy hearing from other folks with research interests in gender, empire, and suffrage history. There's more @SHAFRConference at shafr.memberclicks.net/shafr-2020-vir….
@threadreaderapp unroll
