The authors contributing to this collection analyze the history and consequences of the Supreme Court “Insular Cases” between 1901 and 1922 that invented the enduring constitutional status of unincorporated U.S. territories. The source of the title is the 1901 Downes v. Bidwell opinion on the constitutional status of Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Weiner's, Levinson's, and Perea's chapters are particularly helpful in understanding how the U.S. Supreme Court’s previous conclusions about the legal status and limited constitutional rights of African Americans and Indigenous nations established the framework for defining the legal status and limited constitutional rights of the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.

Jacobs compares how white female reformers in Australia and the United States helped to institutionalize their governments’ policies of removing Native American and Aboriginal children from their families to be raised in distant institutions in the name of protecting children and assimilating Indigenous populations into new modern settler nations. Jacobs shows that by advocating these policies in the United States and Australia, white female reformers contrasted their asserted superior skills as moral guardians of family against stereotypes of inferior mothering among Indigenous and Aboriginal women. The reformers also gained a degree of legitimacy and authority in public policy and government venues from which they had previously been excluded.

Newman analyzes how white women in the United States pursued expanded rights by harnessing human evolution rhetoric toward assertions of their racial similarity to white men and sexual difference from women of color. White women critiqued patriarchal gender expectations within their own race, while also calling for the implementation of these same standards among groups they perceived as less civilized. Drawing on gendered ideals, they claimed to be uniquely qualified to “civilize” Native Americans and colonized populations around the world.

Sneider argues that U.S. expansion and imperialism after the Civil War into the North American West, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico created national discussions about self-government, sovereignty, and voting rights that represented rhetorical opportunities for suffragists while deepening racial divisions in U.S. suffrage politics. White suffragists used the Native American relationship to the federal government as a loose analogy for their own subordinate relationship to the state. At the same time, political rights for women became a contested feature of U.S. colonial rule, as women’s political rights became a marker of “civilization.” Questions of Native American sovereignty, gender dynamics, and citizenship and later of the same for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans led to intensified debates around enfranchising these groups.

This article explores why turn-of-the-20th-century U.S. women’s suffragists and anti-imperialists failed to build a coalition similar to the antislavery and women’s rights alliance that emerged before the U.S. Civil War. Hoganson explores both opposition to and support for imperialism among leading white and Black suffragists and how they linked those positions with their suffrage work. Anti-imperialist suffragists opposed U.S. imperialism for a variety of reasons, including their commitment to self-government, peace, and racial equality. The suffragists attempted to build a coalition with male anti-imperialist leaders and women in the Philippines but largely failed in those efforts.

This article explores the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) suffrage campaigns in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai‘i. White WCTU members strategized to harness colonization of these regions toward enfranchising white women. White male legislators in each region extended or withheld women’s voting rights depending on the anticipated effect of woman’s suffrage on the larger colonial projects. New Zealand enfranchised Maori and white women because Maori women, like men before them, would be limited to Maori-only electorates. Australia excluded all Aborigines at the same time that it enfranchised white women. The republican Hawaiian Constitution denied both white women and Hawaiian women voting rights, since elite white men feared that increasing the Hawaiian vote would hurt their business prospects in the territory.

Terborg-Penn examines how white U.S. suffrage leaders intervened in the suffrage movements of Puerto Rico and St. Thomas during the 1920s and 1930s without undermining the colonial relationships among women and between nations. She shows that, as they did with African American women, white U.S. suffragists viewed the women of these U.S. Caribbean colonies as unready or unfit for enfranchisement. Colonized women’s collaborations with U.S. suffragists facilitated access to U.S. courts and legislators and were a factor in the initial enfranchisement of only literate women in Puerto Rico and propertied women in St. Thomas.

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and “domestic dependent nations”

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and “separate but equal”

Downs v. Bidwell (1901) and “foreign in a domestic sense”

Woman’s Tribune, a suffrage newspaper, reproduced this petition sent by the predominantly white National American Woman Suffrage Association to Congress. It argues that voting in the recently annexed territory of Hawai‘i should not be limited to only men. It also expresses support for the annexation of Hawai‘i and the progress of “civilization” with the extension of suffrage to both men and women equally.