Suffrage scholars have long recognized the de facto exclusion of African American women (and men) from voting long after 1920, as well as Native American and Asian American women deemed ineligible for citizenship. However, as we reflect upon the legacies of the Nineteenth Amendment, women in the United States’s overseas empire have largely been forgotten thus far. What did the Nineteenth Amendment mean for women in the Caribbean and Pacific territories of the United States? When we place women’s suffrage in the historical context of U.S. empire, voting rights look even more gradual and conditional than they were on the mainland alone.
Because the U.S. Constitution did not “follow the flag,” the Nineteenth Amendment simply did not apply to the colonial possessions of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Thus the passage of a federal suffrage amendment did not enfranchise women in those territories, even in principle. In fact, it took decades after 1920 for women—and men—in some parts of the United States to gain the very right, de jure, to vote. And in each American colony, women gained suffrage through a different means. Women in Puerto Rico could not vote until the passage of legislation in 1929, and even then suffrage was limited to literate women until 1935. Women in the U.S. Virgin Islands gained enfranchisement in 1935 through a court ruling. Women in the Philippines finally gained the ballot after voting in their own separate plebiscite in 1937. Neither women nor men in Guam had voting rights until the federal U.S. government passed the Guam Organic Act in 1950. American Samoa first enacted universal suffrage through its federally recognized Constitution in 1967.
The United States treated the colonies it adopted from Spain in 1899 differently from the lands it had previously taken through purchase, annexation, and wars of conquest. Under the earlier model of expansion, the status of Territory was just the first step along the path to eventual statehood; the initial lack of voting rights and self-governance in territories were only temporary. In contrast, the roughly 120,000 square miles of territory acquired in the war against Spain were not set on a path to statehood. Neither were the Caribbean islands that the U.S. purchased from Denmark in 1917.[i]