Manuel L. Quezon and the Filipino women’s suffrage movement of 1937

Manuel L. Quezon is often credited by historians like Encarnacion Alzona (1937) as a staunch advocate of women’s right to vote. Indeed, the history of the struggle for women’s suffrage often highlights the role that Quezon played in terms of supporting the 1937 plebiscite as the president of the Philippine Commonwealth. Various print media of the period like dailies and magazines depicted him, and consequently, the success of the women’s suffrage movement, in the same light (e.g., Philippine Graphic, Manila Bulletin). However, closer scrutiny of Quezon’s speeches, letters, and biography in relation to other pertinent primary sources would reveal that Quezon was, at best, ambivalent, on the cause of the suffragists. His appreciation of the women’s suffrage’s merits was tied and anchored on certain political gains that he could acquire from it. In contrast to the appreciation of his contemporaries like Rafael Palma, Quezon’s appreciation of the women’s right to vote was based on patronage politics and not on the view that the right to suffrage is a right of women and not a privilege. His support for the cause was aimed at putting himself at the forefront of this landmark legislation and thus the real champions of the cause—the women—at the sidelines

Woolf and Suffrage

In Night and Day and The Years, Woolf employs the figure of the suffragist/suffragette to think through problems of feminist history and to imagine feminism’s temporality. Extending work by Sowon Park, Naomi Black, and Clara Jones on Woolf’s relation to the suffrage movement, this chapter places Woolf’s novelistic meditations on suffrage in close dialogue with Elizabeth Robins’s earlier movement novel, The Convert, in order to explore what Woolf can offer us in a rereading of the suffrage archive. Woolf’s careful assessment of movement feminism, and even her ambivalence regarding her activist heroines, invites us to notice complexity, and even ambivalence, in the work of her feminist precursor.

The Woman's Tribune

The Woman's Tribune is a database that provides full-text access (both in digitized and text formats) to the biweekly newspaper of the same name published between 1883-1909. It contains the full run of all 724 issues of this title, which was the second-longest-running women's suffrage newspaper in the United States. It was highly regarded by suffrage movement leaders and Elizabeth Cady Stanton contributed frequently to this publication. This newspaper was intended for general circulation and reached a wide audience as its founder, Clara Bewick Colby, included a variety of topics relevant and important to women especially individuals living in the rural Midwest and West. Content found in this resource includes advertisements, book reviews, domestic new stories, editorials, poetry, recipes, and international coverage of suffragist issues. This resource would support the research needs of faculty, advanced undergraduates, and graduate students.