Four months after the residents of Mashpee held their vote on the issues of land entailment and citizenship, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement and Allotment Act, thereby lifting land entailment, contradicting what Mashpee residents had voted for. The law also extended voting rights to Native American men while simultaneously disenfranchising women, who previously could vote in many of the Indian districts or towns.

Document C

An excerpt from “The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849-1869” by Ann Marie Plane and Gregory Button. This excerpt examines what the women of the Chappaquiddick Tribe living on Martha’s Vineyard stood to lose once the Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement and Allotment Act was passed in 1869.

“Indian women stood to lose some rights if enfranchisement…went forward…[A]mong the Chappaquiddick community, the ‘rights of women are fully recognized, the females taking the same liberty of speech [in meetings] and, when unmarried, or in the absence of their husbands, enjoying the same right of voting with men.’ In the end, the enfranchisement of Indians as citizens would extend the vote only to the menfolk; women who had exercised considerable authority in the absence of their husband may have actually lost considerable official power when enclaves such as Chappaquiddick were forced to conform more closely to dominant American models of governance.”