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 Association 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' 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 Legislature 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 it left the many educated, tax
paying women, the woman in business, the teachers in government and
mission schools, the nurses in the hospitals, the social workers,
wholly in the power of men.

About 1916 there was incorporated in Porto Rico an organization called
La Liga Feminea de Puerto Rico, which worked energetically for the
social uplift of the people and for the political enfranchisement of
women. The official organ was _La Mujer del Siglo Veinte_--_The
Twentieth Century Woman_. Early in the spring of 1917 Mrs. Geraldine
Maud Froscher, an American living in Porto Rico, appealed to the
National Suffrage Association for financial assistance for a campaign
preparatory to the introduction of the woman suffrage bill in the
Legislature that year. Literature was sent immediately and the
association agreed to pay the expenses of Mrs. Froscher, who organized
suffrage leagues in all towns of any considerable size, addressed
women's clubs, interviewe