Before the U.S. entered the war, the Nineteenth Amendment was stalled in Congress; six months after the Armistice it passed both chambers. This paper examines three discrete moments of lawmaking in this period for evidence of how Congressmen’s concept of citizenship changed.
Congressional debates about the status of the Philippines and Puerto Rico—whether they would become independent, become states, or neither—begged questions about the nature of citizenship. Were Filipinos and Puerto Ricans citizens of the U.S., and if so, could they vote in U.S. elections? Local elections? If they could not vote, were they citizens or merely nationals? That such a quasi-citizenship status resembled the condition of most American women was not lost on Congressional women’s suffrage supporters, who introduced bills to enfranchise Filipina and Puerto Rican women.
Separately, the question arose how the U.S. would mobilize soldiers for possible deployment and whether the federal government had the right to do so. Advocates of military “preparedness” told Congress that “manhood suffrage means manhood service.” Yet others, like philosopher Randolph Bourne, derided military service as “a sham universality,” which “omits the feminine half of the nation's youth.” Bourne also questioned the implications of universal service for physically disabled men like himself.
These debates occurred alongside lobbying and demonstrating for the Nineteenth Amendment, and are rich sources for understanding its passage.