Pacific Currents

Carrie Chapman Catt, Helen Hamilton Gardener, and Maud Wood Park were savvy and observant politicians. They convinced congressmen to create a Committee on Woman Suffrage in the House of Representatives in early summer 1917. They worked slowly and steadily throughout the war years to convince Congress that women deserved enfranchisement through a national amendment. And they often pointed to the extensive work the nation’s women were doing in the war effort. While on the whole, well-to-do white women were involved in the volunteering to help shepherd the amendment through the process, that did not mean people of color were absent from the congressional process. Women of color were consistently part of these congressional discussions—sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. For example, since 1912, suffragists and their male allies had petitioned Congress to give the Hawaiian legislature the authority to vote to enfranchise women, and by 1915, both parties in Hawaii had pledged to support the issue. But despite these efforts, they did not convince the Hawaiian legislature to enfranchise women before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.