Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/739

 IN THE TERRITORIES AND PHILIPPINES 723 tion but as a large majority of the men were illiterate and with- out property this aroused a protest, which was supported by the American Federation of Labor. On May 22, 1916, while the Porto Rican bill was under consideration in Committee of the Whole in the Lower House of Congress, the Republican floor leader, James R. Mann (Ills.), discovered that a majority of those present were Republicans and suffragists. He therefore proposed a clause giving the franchise to the women, which was passed by 60 to 37. He expected to put the Democrats in the position of voting it down the next day in regular session but when it came up Republicans joined with Democrats in defeating it by 80 noes to 59 ayes. Finally when, under pressure, the committee was obliged to put in universal suffrage for the great mass of illiterate men, even the most ardent advocates of woman suffrage among the members felt that it would be unwise to add universal suffrage for women. In answer to the urgent request of the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Associa- tion that this injustice should not be done to women, Senator John F. Shafroth, chairman of the Committee on the Pacific Islands and Porto Rico, wrote : "I would have been very glad to incorporate a provision including women but it would have killed the bill. I was notified by Senator Martine of New Jersey and others that they would not permit a provision of that kind to go into it and the parliamentary stage of the bill was such that any one Senator could have defeated it. As it was, it took two years to get the bill before Congress and fully twenty motions to have it considered and if either prohibition or woman suffrage had gone into it there would have been no bill for Porto Rico. We avoided the word 'male 1 in prescribing the qualifications of electors." The Act, which received the approval of President Wilson March 2, 1917, provided that at the first election for the Legis- lature and other officers the electors should be those qualified under the present law, and thereafter voters should be citizens of the United States 21 years of age and have such additional qualifications as might be prescribed by the Legislature of Porto Rico. The election took place on July 16. While this Act was an improvement on the one which admitted Hawaii as a Territory