Joining the Parade: Chinese and Indigenous Women Challenge the Mainstream U.S. Suffrage Movement

This paper analyzes how mainstream suffrage advocates and the U.S. public used images of women of color to debate women’s rights as a starting point for exploring the actual participation of women of color in suffrage debates in the early twentieth century. It builds upon challenges from feminist scholars of color who call for alternative “genealogies of feminism.” I focus on Chinese women in the 1912 New York City suffrage parade and Indigenous women in the 1913 Washington, D.C., parade. In both cases, white American’s ideas about women from these groups led to them being asked to participate in prominent positions. They also received substantial national press coverage before and after the parades. Their decisions to march, however, arose from their own political goals. For example, white suffragists celebrated Native matrilineal traditions as evidence of women holding authority; Native suffragists used that interest to point out the irony that the “First Americans” were denied U.S. citizenship. Chinese suffragists (ineligible for citizenship due to exclusion) used white activists’ interest in the Chinese Revolution and the Republic of China to assert the rights of their communities in the U.S..

These characterizations created points of entry into national (and international) conversations that Chinese and Native women used to address the nation, amplifying their voices far beyond their numbers. These opportunities provided a platform that they used to speak to powerful constituencies, offering critiques of U.S. policies toward their communities and presenting their vision of the nation.