“Nothing Left for Women but Voting”: Suffrage, Empire, and Race in Carrie Chapman Catt’s Early Twentieth-Century Philippine Travel Narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the sojourn of suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt to the Philippines in 1912. Catt travelled to various parts of this Southeast Asian country to investigate conditions shaping local women's lives and help form their own suffrage organisations. Personal accounts of her travels provide a crucial look into Catt’s observations, representations, and perceptions of aspects such as American imperial institutions, including public schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the social and economic standing of Filipino women. Throughout her travels in the Philippines, Catt witnessed the development of the American colonial state’s project of modernity and hegemony as an imperial citizen who also fought for the expansion of democratic rights. Enmeshed in the conflicting processes of complicity and resistance, she engaged in complicated meanings of expansionism, political empowerment, and social hierarchies. I argue that while travelling afforded Catt an opportunity to transgress prescribed political and social spheres, it also served to consolidate her place on the world stage as she promoted a new brand of citizenship that marshalled difference within the framework of white supremacy.