Existing comment:
For Native American women, working for suffrage was also a way to protect their culture and tribal sovereignty. Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin championed Native American rights and invoked Native women's power within their communities, asserting that many had always had the right to vote. In 1913 she marched with fellow lawyers in the Washington, D.C., suffrage parade.
Native Hawaiian women like Emma Kaʻilikapuolono Metcalf Beckley Nakuina supported suffrage as a way to gain back political power after American annexation. They succeeded in persuading mainland suffragists to lobby Congress to empower the Hawaiʻi Territorial Legislature to vote on woman suffrage, but the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified before they could do so. |