Dowsett, Wilhelmina Widemann, 1861-1929

<p>Wilhelmine Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett (March 28, 1861 – December 10, 1929) was a Native Hawaiian suffragist who helped organize the National Women's Equal Suffrage Association of Hawaii, the first women's suffrage club in the Territory of Hawaii in 1912. She actively campaigned for the rights of the women of Hawaii to vote prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920.</p>

<p>She was born on March 28, 1861, at Lihue, Kauai, the daughter of German immigrant and businessman Hermann A. Widemann and his Hawaiian wife Mary Kaumana Pilahiuilani. There was some disagreement about the exact royal descent of her mother after her death, although her mother's grandfather Kalawa was a retainer of the aliʻi of Kauai. Her father was a prominent politician of the Kingdom of Hawaii and a cabinet minister of the last queen Liliʻuokalani.</p>

<p>On April 30, 1888, she married John "Jack" McKibbin Dowsett (1862–1929), a grandson of the British Captain Samuel James Dowsett who settled in Hawaii in 1828. Their wedding at the St. Andrew's Cathedral in Honolulu was attended by members of the Hawaiian Royal Family including King Kalākaua, Queen Kapiʻolani, Princesses Liliʻuokalani and Kaʻiulani. Her husband became a successful businessman with interests in banking, fire insurance, the sugar industry and interisland steamers and became the largest shareholder of Waianae Sugar Company. He served as a Republican Senator in the Hawaii Territorial Legislature from 1905 to 1907 and served as an official on the Board of Agriculture and Foresty and the Board of Prison Inspectors. They had three children: Herbert Melville Kualii (1890–1969), Frank Llewellyn Lunalilo (1891–1962), and Alice Aileen Kekuiapoiwa Liliha (1898–1983).</p>

<p>Born in 1861 at Lihue, Kauai in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann was the daughter of Mary Kaumana Pilahiulani, a Native Hawaiian, and German immigrant Hermann A. Widemann. Part of the Royal Hawaiian family, her father was a cabinet minister for Queen Lili’uokalani. Due to these connections, King Kalākaua and Queen Kapi’olan were present at her wedding to Jack Dowsett in 1888.</p>

<p>Five short years later, pro-American interests, with the assistance of US Marines, overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani and established the Republic of Hawai’i. The former island nation was annexed to the United States in 1898. With the introduction of this new territory to the Union, the mainland suffragists turned their eyes towards the Pacific to see if any progress could be made.</p>

<p>Written by Susan B. Anthony and other officers of the NAWSA, the “Hawaiian Appeal” of 1899 asked the US Congress to give Hawaiian women the right to vote “upon whatever conditions and qualifications the right of suffrage is granted to Hawaiian men.” While Anthony and others wanted all women to have voting rights, they were especially concerned about non-Christian Native Hawaiian men gaining that power before the white and Native Hawaiian women of the territory. The Hawaiian Appeal received criticism from almost all corners. Local women, like Dowsett, felt that petitioning the territorial government for greater civil rights was the way to go.</p>

<p>In 1912, Dowsett founded the National Women’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai’i (WESAH), the first Hawaiian suffrage organization. Modeling its constitution on that of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), they invited mainland suffragists to speak to the group. One of these women included Carrie Chapman Catt in 1918, who spoke in positive terms about the group after the meeting.</p>

<p>Thanks to the efforts of women like Dowsett and WESAH, President Wilson signed a bill allowing the residents of the territory to decide for themselves. Gathering both Native Hawaiian and white suffragists at the capitol building on the morning of the Senate vote on March 4, 1919, Dowsett declared:<br>
<i>“Sister Hawaiians, our foreign sisters are with us. Senator Wise asked us yesterday if the so-called ‘society women’ were leading us, and we told him that this was not so. We are working all together, and we want the legislature to know this. And we must also remember our Oriental sisters, who are not here today but who will also unite this great cause.”’</i></p>

<p>While many in the territory, like those on the mainland, were against granting the right of suffrage to Asian women, Dowsett included them in her vision of Hawai’i’s future. The bill passed the Hawaiian Senate that day, but a fresh battle was waiting in the House. Instead of granting women’s suffrage immediately, the House decided to put it to a vote of the Hawaiian electorate in 1920. Furious with that response, Dowsett and 500 other women of “various nationalities, of all ages” poured onto the House floor with banners demanding “Votes for Women.” Forced to reckon with the demonstrators, the House held hearings the next day for proponents and opponents to make their case. Standing alongside Dowsett were a wide variety of Hawai’ian women including Princess Kalaniana’ole and Lahilahi Webb, former lady-in-waiting to Queen Lili’uokalani’s court.</p>

<p>A month later, the House had not budged and the suffragists of Hawai’i were losing their patience. Regrouping, Dowsett and her group began to lobby directly to the U.S. Congress through the territorial representative, Prince Kūhiō. They also began to create grassroots groups throughout the territory to prepare women for the vote when that opportunity arrived. Hawaiian women became enfranchised along with their mainland sisters when the 19th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution in August 1920. As residents of a U.S. territory, however, their elected representation was limited.</p>

<p>It would take another 39 years for Hawai’i to become the 50th state in the Union, and for the residents of Hawai’i, both male and female, to gain full US voting rights. Dowsett did not live long enough to see that day; she died December 10, 1929. She is buried next to her husband in Oahu Cemetery, Honolulu.</p>

<p>Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett was a suffragist in Hawai‘i who headed the Woman's Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai‘i (WESAH), the first woman suffrage organization formed in the islands at the time of Carrie Chapman Catt's visit to the islands in 1912. This was the organization affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) with Catt's assistance.</p>

<p>Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann was born in Hawai'I to a German planter father, Hermann A. Widemann, and a Native Hawaiian mother of the chiefess rank, Mary Kaumana Pilahiuilani. Her father was a successful coffee planter on the island of Kauai and occupied high-ranking offices in the kingdom government. He was once known as a “devoted royalist” supporting Queen Liliuokalani in resisting U.S. annexation.</p>

<p>In 1888 Widemann married John “Jack” Dowsett, descended from a British sea captain who settled in Hawaii in 1828. Racially-and-culturally-hybrid Wilhelmina K.W. Dowsett mediated U.S.-colonized Native Hawaiian women and demographically-minority white-settler colonialist women by generating a woman suffrage movement in post-annexation Hawai‘i. Dowsett, along with her sister Emilie Kekauluohi Widemann Macfarlane, were also active in the Daughters of Hawai‘i, an organization of white settler women of missionary heritage and Native Hawaiian women to preserve the kingdom's high culture, to which both groups of women belonged.</p>

<p>Hawai‘i became a U.S. possession in 1898 and a territory in 1900. When the Hawaiian Organic Act written on Capitol Hill depriving women citizens in the islands of suffrage, racially-hybrid Native Hawaiian women, especially those born to a non-American father and Native Hawaiian mother of the chiefess rank, took leadership roles in generating a woman suffrage movement. On the occasion of Carrie Chapman Catt's visit to the islands in 1912, they formed an organization, for the suffrage cause. With Catt's assistance, it became Hawai‘i's affiliate of NAWSA in 1913. Since then, mainland NAWSA members visited the islands to promote and to report about woman suffrage activity in the islands. Their reports, such as those written by Alice Locke Park of Palo Alto in 1915 and Almira Hollander Pitman of Brookline MA in 1917, impressed their readers with Hawai‘i's territorial legislators' readiness for woman's vote. Accordingly, NAWSA leaders successfully pressed Congress to place the woman suffrage issue under the jurisdiction of Hawai‘i's territorial legislature in 1918.</p>

<p>Encouraged by such developments, Hawai‘i's woman suffrage movement thrived. In 1919, a series of mass demonstrations were held drawing women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Nonetheless, deliberations in the two-house Territorial Legislature dragged on with the all-male legislators quarreling over how and when to grant women suffrage. Thus, momentum for woman suffrage eroded.</p>

<p>It was during this period that Hawai‘i's political, economic, and civic affairs were under the oligarchic rule of the minority white men of missionary heritage. Native Hawaiians constituted the clear majority of voters, but white men and women shared “settler anxiety” towards Native Hawaiian women, who numerically and politically exceeded white women. These white men and women were also concerned about the surging numbers of children of Asian immigrants with birthright citizenship who would soon reach voting age. Accordingly, while white men and women in power appeared to be supportive of woman suffrage, their main concern was how to avoid or at least delay non-white voters' victory over the white male oligarchic rule.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibited federal and state governments from disfranchising women, and on August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby extended the amendment to be applied to women citizens in Hawai‘i.</p>

<p>Dowsett, presumably due to her German heritage, made especial efforts in war-relief and war-support movements led by white settler women of missionary heritage during WWI. After the war, she successfully generated racially-mixed mass women's demonstrations for the woman suffrage cause.</p>