Suffrage and Native Women
The question of Native women’s suffrage intersects with Zitkála-Šá’s career in specific and revealing ways.
The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, guaranteed women the right to vote — but its application to Native women was complicated by the same citizenship question that affected Native people generally. Native women who were not citizens could not vote under the Nineteenth Amendment, regardless of its general provisions.
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 resolved the citizenship question by granting citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States, which in principle opened voting rights to Native women along with other Native people. But the implementation of these rights was another matter — states had their own voting laws and their own mechanisms of enforcement, and in practice, Native voting rights were restricted in various states through poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and other mechanisms that were used across the country to suppress voting by people the political establishment didn’t want to empower.
Zitkála-Šá was a supporter of women’s suffrage and engaged with the broader suffrage movement, though the relationship between the mainstream suffrage movement and Native women was complicated by the racial dynamics of a movement that was sometimes willing to explicitly exclude women of color to secure white women’s votes.
Her work on the citizenship and voting rights questions was part of the same political project as her work on land rights, boarding schools, and corruption: the effort to make the promises of American political life real for Native people.