Votes for Women

When famed Feminist Carrie Chapman Catt saw that the fight for woman suffrage in the U. S. was about to be won. she journeyed to the Philippine Islands in 1913 and publicly proposed suffrage for her little brown sisters. Male Filipinos laughed derisively. Their women had been virtual slaves in their homes until the Philippines came under U. S. rule in 1899.

By the time Mrs. Catt sailed away, however, Filipino women were up & doing about enfranchisement. The native politicians adopted bobbing & weaving tactics. At one session the Philippine Senate would pass a bill enfranchising women, and the House would kill it. At the next the House would do the passing, the Senate the killing. Realizing that the men could not save their political faces forever with such trickery, the women campaigned ever more vigorously. When, in 1933, Michigan's Bachelor Frank Murphy became the first Democratic Governor-General in twelve years, they had the gallant ally they needed. With his help they finally got a suffrage bill passed.

The unsympathetic Philippine males had another trick to play. Into the proposed new Philippine Commonwealth Constitution, soon to be offered for approval by a plebiscite, they wrote a clause specifically withholding suffrage from women. Thus, if the women voted Yes in the plebiscite, they would be voting to disenfranchise themselves; if they voted No, they would be voting against freedom for the Philippines. Setting up a loud clamor, they finally got a clause inserted that would restore suffrage to literate women of 21 or over if they could muster 300,000 affirmative votes at a plebiscite within two years after the Constitution was adopted.

Last week, with the end of the two-year period only two weeks away, the women held their plebiscite, settled their suffrage question once & for all. With more than 100,000 votes to spare, they became the first females in the Orient to hoist themselves to political parity with their menfolk.

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