Women’s Rights Champion Pushes to Finish the Fight

CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, Passing the Federal Suffrage Amendment (1918)

Twice elected president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Carrie Chapman Catt led the fight for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote. Her superior skills at organizing were instrumental in national and international efforts to advance women’s rights. In this introduction to The Woman Citizen, a civics handbook written for women, Catt describes the work remaining and the significance of the vote for women.

To convince the legislatures of thirty-six states that ratification of the Federal Suffrage Amendment is necessary will be the last task of the suffragists of the United States before their organizations disband in victory or, as is more usual, are turned into good government leagues and civic associations.

The twelve equal suffrage states will ratify automatically. In the eight other states whose legislatures have recently bestowed a large degree of suffrage on women, ratification will also be easy.

The end and aim of suffragists is “a vote for every woman of every state by the next presidential election.” Forty-two legislatures sit in 1919 and the bulk of the work for ratification will easily be finished before 1920.

This will be the fitting climax of the work of three generations of American women; or the grandmothers of young women now working for the vote began the struggle. …

In spite of the handicap of a required two-thirds vote, which allows a small minority to checkmate the will of a large majority, certainty grows that the Amendment will pass.

Great Britain and Canada have extended suffrage to women as a war measure; France and Italy have virtually promised to do so.

President Wilson, himself, has recognized it as a national war measure — a part of the struggle to make the world safe for democracy — and as such has urged it on Congress.

In June, 1918, he said: “The full and sincere democratic reconstruction of the world for which we are striving, and which we are determined to bring about at any cost, will not have been completely or adequately attained until women are admitted to the suffrage, and only by that action can the nations of the world realize for the benefit of future generations the full ideal force of opinion or the full humane force of action.” …

Prejudice and tradition are breaking down everywhere before the onslaughts of reason. Women have proved that their service to the State is efficient and essential. Arguments against their complete enfranchisement now sound churlish. And men are in a mood of gratitude and appreciation, and not disposed to be churlish.

Ideas of freedom, locked and padlocked in the back of men’s minds, have been breaking jail. Men had not previously shut the door on women deliberately. They had been serenely sure they didn’t need them in public life until of late. Now they are getting strangely humble. Doubtless statesmen in the United States are thinking in terms of political freedom as they have not since the Civil War.

Thus the political significance of an issue which now affects many millions of women is not lost upon political leaders.

Leaders of all political parties, major and minor, have begun to demand it, and the national committees of the major parties have endorsed the Federal Amendment. Almost 8,000,000 voters, men and women, demand it in the twelve equal suffrage states and already the legislatures of many of these states, notably New York, the youngest of the group, have virtually ratified the Amendment in advance by sending resolutions to the Senate, urging its passage. Two million organized suffragists, uncounted millions of their unorganized helpers, women who are to-day trying to give themselves in two directions by laboring for suffrage and for the war, clamor to be relieved from their double task and to be allowed to give all their time to war work.

For months past page after page of the Congressional Record has been filled with the text or titles of petitions to Congress, and these are, according to the statements of Senators themselves, only a few of those received from organizations which represent millions of men and women.

All these things show that public sentiment is in favor of woman suffrage. When in a case like this one-third of the Senate plus one vote can defeat the will of democracy, there must be some among the “doubtful” senators who will, as the vote approaches, feel the pressure of public opinion and shrink from the odium of being handed down to posterity for voting against democracy during a war for democracy.

Once through Congress, the Amendment will be given over to the state legislatures. The sovereign states will then decide the fate of woman suffrage. Thirty-six legislatures must ratify before the Federal Amendment becomes the law of the land, and every prospect now promises that the states will respond cordially.

It is not conceivable that there will be delay or resistance to the suffrage measure in the smaller units of government when once the federal measure is passed. For the question of enfranchisement of the women of the land has involved a progressive education, starting with resistance to the basic idea that woman is a distinct civic entity, capable of holding and conveying property, of being educated, of being the guardian of her own children.

The last defense of males who protect women from sharing in the common human desire for freedom, is that women do not want to vote. …

Overwhelming evidence has shown that it is not true; that women are as ready as are men to share the burdens of democracy. Not only did New York State give a final and effective blow to this reason when it enrolled the names of 1,030,000 women of the State who asked for their enfranchisement, but in every political step since their emancipation have they shown a full conscience ready for full citizenship.

In the same manner women of Texas registered an alert conscience, an incontrovertible patriotism, and a high sense of political honor in their use of the vote at the 1918 primaries, when they relentlessly overthrew politicians proved unworthy of trust.

Always before this, electoral changes have meant extension of the franchise to new groups of voters; loosely speaking they have meant more voters. Votes for women is a movement concerned far less with numbers than with inner meanings. It means informing the whole field of public life with the woman spirit, if it means anything at all. It is this that war has made evident in Europe, and will make evident in America. Woman suffrage is preeminently a war measure.

It is this which has recently aroused women of the South and Middle West to renewed demand for the vote in those states where the alien man has been permitted to vote when he was too little in sympathy with the ideals of this government to fight for them.

Not only a burning patriotism has aroused the women of these states as never before to work for their right to voice their own principles of government, but a real desire to protect the interests of their sons and husbands at the front from possible domination by a hostile spirit at home has inflamed them into a new crusade.

It is the spirit of the mother, the wife, the loyal American which has been injected into the states where this question is acute. And having once been awakened, men and women everywhere see that the woman’s point of view cannot be pushed out of the councils which are to make for a better State.

The housewife’s own knowledge must enter into food conservation if it is to be an effective conservation. The nurse’s own experience must obtain to make the Red Cross do its effective best. The understanding women have of woman must be taken into account to keep the camp zone clean, for this is a problem that touches women and men both. The mother’s voice is above all the one which will be wanted for deliberations about an increased birth rate to make up for war’s ravages unless the world is to be thrust back into that disrespect for the child’s right to be well born out of which it has been slowly emerging.

It is these considerations and not the granting of rewards to ammunition-making women, which has made statesmen declare that the ballot for women is a measure needed by a world at war as a safeguard of civilization and an assurance that the world is safe for democracy.

Carrie Chapman Catt, “Passing the Federal Suffrage Amendment,” introduction to The Woman Citizen, by Mary Sumner Boyd (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1918), 1–9.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS