A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism

Abstract

In 1902, Clemencia López journeyed to the United States to work for the liberation of her imprisoned brothers and for Filipino independence. She granted interviews, circulated her photograph, and spoke in public under the sponsorship of American anti-imperialists and suffragists. López argued that Filipinos like herself were already a civilized people and thus did not need Americans' “benevolent assimilation.” Her gender and her elite family background helped her make this case. Instead of presenting her as racially inferior, published accounts expressed appreciation of her feminine refinement and perceptions of her beauty as exotic. Americans simultaneously perceived her as apolitical because of her sex. López was thus able to take advantage of American gender politics to discuss the “delicate subject” of autonomy for the Philippines in ways that anti-imperialist Filipino men could not.