Equality for Women
Women's Suffrage
In 1915, a forty-thousand-person march in New York City with women dressed in white sent a strong message of support for women’s right to vote. Mabel Vernon and Sara Bard Field also gathered over 500,000 signatures on petitions to Congress in a transcontinental tour.
It was the skilled strategist Carrie Chapman Catt, a teacher and school superintendent in Iowa, who led the women’s suffrage movement over the finish line. As an activist in the women’s suffrage movement since the 1880s and a close colleague of Anthony, Catt served as the president of the NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920 (she took time off from her role to help care for her dying husband). She was a brilliant strategist who was very good at organizing campaigns, mobilizing volunteers, and delivering speeches. Throughout her forty years involved in the movement, she mobilized one million volunteers and gave hundreds of speeches and led dozens of campaigns.
After Catt returned as NAWSA president in 1915, she proposed the “Winning Plan” the following year which tactfully coordinated state suffrage efforts with efforts for a constitutional amendment. (By this time, some states had adopted women’s suffrage, such as Nevada, and Montana, Oregon, and Kansas.) The election of the first woman to Congress in 1916, Jeannette Rankin of Montana who ran on a platform of a women’s suffrage Constitutional amendment, solidified the plan.
