Ana Roqué de Duprey

Ana Roqué de Duprey was, by the account commonly told, the youngest teacher's assistant in Puerto Rico's history, starting at age 11 in 1864, decades before the American invasion that would eventually shape the fight she is most remembered for. When she died in 1933, she had founded what became the Mayagüez campus of the University of Puerto Rico, built a career in botany and astronomy, and led not one but three rival organizations fighting for women's right to vote.

The immediate spark of her suffrage work was an omission written straight into U.S. colonial law. The Jones Act of 1917 extended the right to vote for the island's legislature only to adult male citizens. That same year, Roqué and other professional women responded by founding the Liga Femínea Puertorriqueña, the island's first feminist organization.

Progress on the mainland did not automatically help Puerto Rican women. When the 19th Amendment passed in 1920, granting American women the vote nationwide, the group realized it did not in fact extend to Puerto Rico. In 1921 they reorganized as the Liga Social Sufragista, broadening their aims to include the right to hold office alongside the basic right to vote.

The movement was not united, and that disagreement mattered. By 1924 it split over strategy, and Roqué led one breakaway faction, the Asociación de Mujeres Sufragistas Puertorriqueñas, campaigning specifically for suffrage without literacy or property restrictions, a more inclusive standard than some rival factions were pushing.

The victory, when it finally came, came in two stages and not at once. Literate women won the vote first, in 1932. Full, unrestricted suffrage for all voting-age women followed in 1935, two years after Roqué's death in Río Piedras, so she did not live to see the fight she had devoted decades to fully won.

She was posthumously named an honoree of the National Women's History Alliance in 2020, a late recognition for a woman whose life's work spanned education, science, and a decades-long political fight that outlived her by more than eighty years.

Sources: Ana Roqué de Duprey. Freeze 2026-08-22.