Timeline of women's suffrage in Hawaii

1890

• Representatives William Pūnohu White and John Bush work to amend the constitution for women's suffrage.[1]

1892

• Joseph Nāwahī also puts forward women's suffrage legislation.[1]

1893

• Queen Liliʻuokalani is deposed in a coup d’état that creates a provisional government.[2]
• Women lose many political rights under the provisional government, including voting rights.[2][3]

• Hui Aloha ʻĀina o Na Wahine (Hawaiian Women's Patriotic League) was founded to oppose the overthrow and annexation, on March 27, 1893, by Emilie Widemann Macfarlane and later led by Abigail Kuaihelani Campbell.[4][5]

1894

• A Woman Suffrage Committee of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) works to get the Hawaii constitutional convention delegates to support women's suffrage.[6][7]

1899

• Susan B. Anthony and members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) write the "Hawaiian Appeal" requesting that the U.S. Congress give women equal suffrage rights.[8]
• The annexation precludes the right of the territorial legislature to make decisions about suffrage.[9]

1912

• Around this period, Emma Kaili Metcalf Beckley Nakuina and Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett begin to organize groups for women's suffrage in Hawaii.[2]
• Carrie Chapman Catt visits Hawaii.[10]
• National Women's Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai'i is formed.[2]

1915

• Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole brings a women's suffrage resolution for Hawaii to the United States Congress.[11]

1916

• Prince Kūhiō brings another women's suffrage resolution to the U.S. Congress.[11]

1917

• Almira Hollander Pitman visits Hawaii and speaks to the territorial legislature on women's suffrage.[11]
• Prince Kūhiō brings a suffrage bill to the United States Congress so Hawaii can determine their own suffrage rules.[12]
• June 1: Senator John F. Shafroth brings the suffrage bill to the floor of the Senate.[12]
• September 15: The bill passes the Senate.[12]

1918

• April 29: Maud Wood Park, Anna Howard Shaw and Pitman testify on Hawaii suffrage at the House Committee on Woman Suffrage.[12][13]
• June: The suffrage bill passes into law and now Hawaii can make its own suffrage decisions in the territorial legislature.[14]

1919

• March 4: Women's suffrage meeting held at the Hawaii Capitol.[15]
• March 6: Second women's meeting for women's suffrage held at the Capitol.[16]
• March 19: Suffrage demonstration held in Hilo.[17]
• March 23: Mass demonstrations held at the House, with around 500 women of "various nationalities, of all age."[18]

1920

• August 26: The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment applies to territories, giving women the right to vote.[19][20]
• August 30: The first women's voter registration drive takes place.[19] The first woman to register was Johanna N. Wilcox.[21]

• Basson, Lauren L. (Winter 2005). "Fit for Annexation but Unfit to Vote?: Debating Hawaiian Suffrage Qualifications at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". Social Science History. 29 (4): 575–598 – via JSTOR.
• Harper, Ida Husted (1922). The History of Woman Suffrage. New York: J.J. Little & Ives Company.
• Yasutake, Rumi (2017). "Re-Franchising Women of Hawai'i, 1912-1920". In Choy, Catherine Ceniza; Tzu-Chun Wu, Judy (eds.). Gendering the Trans-Pacific World. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. ISBN 9789004336100.