The year was 1908 and Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont found herself a very wealthy widow upon the death of her second husband Oliver Belmont, and with lots of time on her hands. Alva had always been a fighter and worked hard to benefit her family and place in New York’s elite society. She also contributed to programs that benefited the poor and working-class women. So, she decided to explore the women’s suffrage movement. She had always given lip service to women’s right to vote, but as an activist and benefactor…she had her shortcomings. At the time, if Alva was to be remembered at all, it was as the mother who kidnapped her daughter and forced her into a loveless marriage with the Duke of Marlborough. She wanted to change that perception.
Alva Belmont
Invited by her daughter’s friend to a meeting that featured Carrie Catt and Ida Tarbell, Alva found it boring. Alva had strong views about the world of politics. She believed men respect power, women had no leverage, 50 years of education had not accomplished the right to vote, and with nothing to negotiate, the movement would not succeed unless the effort was more militant and stimulating. Thus, gaining the right to vote became another war to Alva.
She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association, sponsored lectures on its behalf in Newport and New York City, encouraged the association to sponsor rallies and parades (similar to those that Emmeline Pankhurst was doing in London), and pushed for actions to capture press attention. However, the NAWSA was not enthusiastic with the ideas of this “Johnny come lately.” Women had committed time and energy to the work of suffrage quite respectively for decades. Impatient, Alva resigned from NAWSA in 1914 and joined Alice Paul’s new group, The National Woman’s Party, and their more militant approach. Over the years, Alva would contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to the effort to secure suffrage for women.
Carrie Chapman Catt
The road to success had not been easy. Long before Alva Belmont came on the scene, strategies for accomplishing the goal of suffrage had been split among different, competing organizations. In 1869, disagreement over support for the 15th Amendment—granting African American men the right to vote—caused the first split. Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—the early organizers of the National Woman Suffrage Association—opposed the amendment, arguing, “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the union.”.
Meanwhile, Lucy Stone, her husband Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Henry Ward Beecher supported the amendment and formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. Headquartered in Boston and more moderate in their goals, the AWSA became more popular as Stone also published Woman’s Journal (which lasted until 1931). The overall division continued for 21 years until Stone’s daughter, Alice Blackwell, negotiated a merger in 1890, which became the National American Woman Suffrage Association and boasted 7,000 members. But 25 years later, the overall suffrage movement would split opinions again. This time over a strategy disagreement between NAWSA President Carrie Catt and newly-formed NWP’s leader Alice Paul (and her benefactor Alva Belmont).
Carrie Chapman Catt was born Carrie Lane in Ripon, Wisconsin on Jan 9, 1859. Ripon was a politically active town in the 1850s, strongly anti-slavery, and is recognized as the birthplace of the Republican party. At age seven, her family moved to Iowa, where she entered college and worked as a dishwasher and teacher to pay for her expenses. During her time at Iowa State University, she organized a female debate society, which gained the women’s right to speak at campus meetings. She was the only female to graduate in her 1880 class.
In life after college, she became the first female school superintendent in Mason City, Iowa. She later married newspaper editor Leo Chapman, worked as San Francisco’s first female journalist after he died, and returned to Iowa to marry George Catt, a wealthy engineer in 1890, the same year NAWSA was born. He encouraged her to participate in the suffrage movement, where her organizational skills and political savvy, in turn, encouraged more women to push for the right to vote.
In 1900, Carrie Catt was elected President of NAWSA, a position she held for four years before resigning to tend to her husband’s ill health. During her appointment, she introduced her “society plan” for invigorating the suffrage cause. America was in the midst of its most progressive era, a time of social activism and political reform. Based on the idea that women had a moral duty and responsibility to transform public policy, women’s clubs began springing up in towns and communities across America. Originally literary groups, these middle-class clubs were tackling issues such as child labor, education, and civil justice in the municipalities of their homes. Catt proposed to tap into this network of “municipal housekeepers” on behalf of the suffrage movement. By 1910, one-million women were involved in woman’s clubs.
Lucy Stone
Anna Shaw would follow Catt as president of NAWSA, serving ten years and combating the rise of States’ rights in the suffrage movement and the southern leagues that were excluding the participation of African American women. Shaw would not adopt policies that “advocated the exclusion of any race or class from the right of suffrage. The Southern States Woman Suffrage Association, for example, with its racist agenda was weakening the NAWSA in her opinion. This, however, differed from a growing sentiment among membership that the NAWSA needed to appeal to the southern faction to advance the overarching movement. Thus, Carrie Catt—long considered a brilliant political strategist—was elected NAWSA’s president for the second time, in 1915.
In 1916, Catt issued her “winning strategy” for political action. NASWA lobbying teams would push for increased State support under a more centralized management, deal with States’ rights by appealing to the prejudice of the Southern organizations, and work to secure the support of elected Congressional leaders. It was a two-fold agenda: create a critical mass of State suffrage legislation that would lead to Federal support. The Blackwell/Catt strategy in the South proclaimed that suffrage of educated women would increase white supremacy based on a larger mass of qualified white women voters. The strategy, however, did not gain any Federal southern elected legislator support, but did succeed in capturing State Democrat and Republican party support for suffrage votes.
Alice Paul
Catt then engaged in open combat with Alice Paul, president of the new National Woman’s Party. While a member of NASWA, Paul had pursued a more militant agenda to garner press attention. She helped stage the first major parade in Washington, D.C., the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Women picketed the White House with banners proclaiming, “How long must women wait for liberty.” The march became riotous and was finally settled down by the Calvary. But it did attract attention. One observer noted, “The movement, when we got into it, had as much energy as a dying kitten; it is now a big virile, threatening thing, and is actually fashionable.”
The next year, a once-reluctant President Wilson supported the Suffrage Amendment. And in 1914, the one-million-member General Federation of Women’s Clubs did too. But Catt’s growing dislike for Paul’s singular focus on federal legislation and militant action—that gained press attention with arrests and hunger strikes—compelled Paul to leave NAWSA and form the National Woman’s Party in 1916. Paul continued picketing and organized rallies that pressured elected leaders, particularly Democrats who controlled Congress and were targeted for election defeat. Despite their division over strategy, Paul seldom criticized Catt or the NAWSA, seeing the ultimate goal as one and the same.
When NAWSA supported the armed forces and United States engagement in World War I, Catt won praise from politicians as public attitude shifted to one of respect for the patriotism of these moral and respectable women that sought the right to vote. Catt was visible, respected, and a darling of the press. In the early 20th century, Catt was one of the best-known women in the United States, as she led an army of two million to pressure Congress for support of the 19th Amendment. After endless lobbying, on August 26, 1919, Congress supported the amendment granting women—all women—the right to vote.
But the battle was not over. Thirty-six states had yet to ratify the amendment over the next year. States’ rights would rear its head in opposition of the 19th Amendment, but by a slim vote in Tennessee and the untiring dedication of Catt, the vote for women was won. The press and politicians credited Catt for doing the slow, steady, respectable work that won the day. Paul and her tactics were dismissed.
Six months prior to the ratification victory, Catt founded The League of Women Voters, to ensure that, win or lose, women would continue to have a large role in public affairs with a focus on civic engagement and political action. Today, 100 years later, there are more than 1,000 local associations among all 50 states and the Virgin Islands.
Anna Shaw
NAWSA became the League of Women Voters. The National Woman’s Party continued with a new battle to secure additional equal rights for women. Forgotten for a nearly a century, Alice Paul and Alva Belmont were memorialized by President Barack Obama in 2016, during a presidential proclamation establishing the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, D.C. And their battle for equal rights—specifically the Equal Rights Amendment, first written and introduced to Congress by Paul in 1923—finally gained the ratification of state number 38, Virginia, in January 2020 (thus gaining the “three-fourths of the union” threshold written into the Constitution for its adoption).
The parades, pickets, arrests, and the degradation that took place during the militant years are visual reminders of a long-lasting struggle, cued in 1787 when Abigail Adams asked her husband to “remember the ladies” as he drafted the U.S. Constitution or else there would be riots in the streets. But it was the enduring commitment of those at Seneca Falls in 1848 that ushered along a forceful movement—led by the sophisticated leadership, practical politics, and commitment to education and just reform of Carrie Catt—that delivered victory in the war for women’s suffrage.
