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The American people learned about plans for governing the newly annexed islands of Hawaii when President William McKinley delivered to Congress the recommendations of the Hawaiian Commission on 6 December 1898.1 Susan B. Anthony read and saved the summary published the next day in Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, underlining its most startling propositions about race and sex.2 Perhaps she anticipated the proposal that only male citizens of the United States would be eligible to vote for members of a new bicameral legislature, though with that recommendation ,the Hawaiian Commission disregarded the achievement of full suffrage for women in four of the United States.But she could not have predicted that the commissioners would take the extra precaution to protect male-only government by adding that only male citizens could serve in that legislature. The commission’s plan was, Anthony would soon point out, more exclusive than any state’s constitution in the country. It was as if the history of her life’s work never happened, as if the contemporary agitation for equal rights did not exist. Over the next several weeks, the report to Congress became the keystone of Anthony’s fears that her younger co-workers lacked the political perspective to lead. Their failure to respond to the Hawaiian Commission revealed their blindness to a current wave of reaction against woman’s rights. In a letter to Anna Shaw, she described “the tendency shown all round of a reactionary sentiment—action—”3 Hawaii was but the first of many islands suddenly under American control for which governments would be required. Moreover, political rights in Hawaii or any island were 1 Hawaiian Commission. Message from the President of the United States,55th Cong., 3d sess., Senate Doc. 16. 2 Susan B.Anthony scrapbook 28,Rare Books Division,Library of Congress. Anthony underlined these remarkable words about race, quoted in the article from the commission’s report: “All white persons, including Portuguese and persons of African descent, and all persons descended from the Hawaiian race, . . . are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” 3 Document number 109 within. • Introduction ^ xxv not the only contest.The news in December 1898 brought weekly evidence of assaults on women’s economic gains in the private and public sectors. Even their relatively secure claim as teachers in the nation’s public schools was the target of a respected, “progressive” commission headed by University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper.4 “Our souls ought all to be on fire—& yet no one seems awake to the threatening signs of the times,” Anthony told Shaw. Those “signs” pointed to multiple assaults on the gains made in woman’s rights.5 For woman suffragists, it had been a year of festivities—launched inauspiciously on the day in February the battleship Maine blew up in Havana’s harbor. Five decades of work since the woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls were celebrated in 1898 against the background of war with Spain. At the first event, on 15 February 1898, delegates to the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association’s annual meeting in Washington listened to an address titled “Our Defeats and Our Triumphs,” sent from New York by their honorary president, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. For the younger activists in attendance she counseled, “the pioneers have brought you through the wilderness in sight of the promised land; now, with active, aggressive warfare,take possession.”But along with her calls to “agitate the whole community,”Stanton reiterated her progressive faith,her conviction that the ground women gained,they would hold.Pointing to the four states where women already voted, the two dozen states where women enjoyed partial suffrage, and the many women across the country holding elected office, Stanton opined, “[t]he suffrage question is practically conceded. . . . The opposition with their flimsy protests and platitudes are wandering in fields where long ago the harvests were gathered and garnered.”6 4 On Harper’s attempt to deploy more men into the classrooms of public schools while cutting the salaries of women already teaching, see Chicago Educational Commission, Report of the Educational Commission of the City of Chicago, Appointed by the Mayor, Hon. Carter H. Harrison, January 19th, 1898 (Chicago, 1899), and Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (Albany, N.Y., 2005). 5 The events of the month of December 1898 are also linked in “Women Should Wake Up, Says Susan B. Anthony. Here’s a Bugle Blast from the Famous Champion of Her...

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