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Two New Faces of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
At the turn of the century, the first suffragettes– Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – began to age.
The torch of the women’s suffrage movement was passed to a new generation of women.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Born in Wisconsin in 1859, Carrie Chapman Catt graduated from Iowa State University
as the only woman in her class. She began work as a teacher, principal, and school
superintendent. In the 1880s Catt served as a delegate to the newly formed National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). By 1900, Catt succeeded the 80year-old activist Susan B. Anthony as its president.
Catt liked to plan and organize; she worked on many fronts and used compromises to
advance her cause strategically. After hearing Catt address a women's suffrage
convention in Canton, New York in 1914, a reporter described her speech as factual,
peace-making, and delivered so as not to offend. Catt’s skill at uniting different divisions
into one unified women’s rights movement enabled her to pursue the goal of state
suffrage (gaining the right to vote in each state individually).
 THINK: What modern movement is also slowly becoming legal, state by state?
Catt clashed with a group led by the far more combative Alice Paul, who wanted to work for a constitutional amendment
only at the federal level. Catt saw that suffrage at the state level could help strengthen the movement for a
Constitutional amendment -- and where complete state suffrage could not be enacted, Catt would settle for a partial
solution. Despite this friction, it was Catt's leadership - progressive but not radical - that finally led President Wilson to
throw his support behind the amendment.
Alice Paul
Alice Paul was a part of NAWSA (National American Women’s Suffrage Association) but
became impatient with the slow process ofstate suffrage. She had spent her mid-20s in England,
where she became a follower of British suffragists who were much more militant. While there,
she met another American, Lucy Burns. The two were constantly arrested with British
suffragettes for holding demonstrations outside meetings where politicians were in attendance.
The two American women would see [aggressive action] as the solution for women’s right to
vote in the United States. A year after returning to the states, they would break away from the
NAWSA in 1913 and form the National Women’s Party (NWP). They wanted to go directly to
Congress and, more importantly, the president to resolve the issue.
Alice Paul was impatient. She organized a suffrage parade in Washington DC on the same day as
President Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. In 1916, when she had advance information that
Woodrow Wilson’s annual message to Congress contained no reference to suffrage, she planned an even bigger event to
steal the spotlight. Beginning in January 1917, suffragists began picketing the White House, something that had never
been done before. Through cold and snow, rain and wind, each day the suffragettes
would show up holding signs outside the president’s home.
When Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, the pickets continued
despite threats of arrest. Not even arrest and jail could stop them. Conditions in the
jails where they were sent were appalling. Paul went on a hunger strike in prison and
was force fed by the wardens. It even became fashionable to picket for suffrage and
then serve time in jail. Ultimately her tactics, as well as persuasion from Carrie
Chapman Catt, induced President Woodrow Wilson to support a women’s suffrage
amendment. Paul was a pivotal force in the passage and ratification in 1920 of the
Nineteenth Amendment, giving all women the right to vote.