For What Is a Citizen But a Vote?

by

Lauren Roberts

There are two kinds of restrictions upon human liberty—the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by public opinion.

—Carrie Chapman Catt

The American women’s campaign for the right to vote might be said to have its origins in a letter dated March 31, 1776. In this wife-to-husband missive, Abigail Adams reminded John, who was in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress to work on the Declaration of Independence, to “. . . remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors . . . If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Unfortunately, John was nothing but amused by her letter. “As to your extraordinary code of laws,” he wrote, “I cannot but laugh . . . we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.”

“I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies,” she wrote back, “for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that . . .  notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.”

In 1848,  the first women’s rights convention in the United States was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Their “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” outlined the main issues and goals for the emerging women’s movement. Eleven years later, the woman who would become a leader in the struggle to gain the vote, Carrie Lane Chapman Catt, was born. Catt (1859–1947) is the woman I believe is pictured on this handmade bookmark. However, I cannot say with certainty because of all the pictures of her in the Library of Congress and various other institutional holdings, none match this one—something one would expect of a formal portrait of a leader. Yet the chin, ears, nose, lips, brows, forehead and hair (even though it is pulled tighter here than in other images) are so similar as to warrant my belief.

Unfortunately, nothing on the bookmark or the picture gives any indication of date or place, though it is obviously a late 19th century or very early 20th century image based on the costume. Questions abound. If it is Carrie Chapman Catt, why are there no other copies of this image to be found? Who made the bookmark? Was it a gift to or from Carrie or someone close to her? These are questions to which I’d love the answers. As mentioned above, though, there are sufficient physical indications as well as the slogan written in gold ink—We will march on to victory—to lead me to believe it is her (or possibly her mother). Which is the rest of this column . . .

Carrie was born the second of three children and the only daughter. The road to her life may have been set the day she asked why her mother was not getting dressed up to go to town to vote like her father and his hired man. The resultant laughter and the reason—that voting was too important a civic duty to leave to women—never left her.

She entered Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1877 and supported herself by working in the state library and the college kitchen. Three years later, she graduated at the top of her class—the only woman among 18 graduates.

She then worked as a school teacher and principal and in 1883, was appointed superintendent of schools, one of the first women in the country to hold this position. While working in this capacity, she met Leo Chapman, publisher and editor of the Mason City Republican. Each considered the other an equal co-editor. Her column, “Woman’s World,” focused on women’s political and labor issues, reminding women that if they wanted to vote they needed to organize. 

When Leo was forced to sell the paper, he moved to San Francisco to look for  work, but instead caught typhoid and died before Carrie could join him. Twenty-seven, a new widow and alone in the city with few financial resources but plenty of personal ones, she found work as the city’s first female reporter before returning to Iowa in 1887 where she became an organizer for the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association where she re-met George W. Catt, a fellow university alumnus.

Meanwhile, disagreement on whether the best strategy was to pursue enfranchisement through a federal amendment or by individual state campaigns had divided the movement in 1869 into the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. But by the time Carrie married Catt in 1890, the two groups had reunited to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). George, she said, “used to say that he was as much of a reformer as I, but that he couldn’t work at reforming and earn a living at the same time; but what he could do was to earn living enough for two and free me from all economic burden, and thus I could reform for two.”

She did. An effective organizer and rousing speaker with diplomatic skills and political savvy, Carrie moved quickly into the inner circles of the suffrage movement. By 1895, she had become chairwoman of the organization committee in charge of field work for NAWSA and converted it from a loose coalition into a tightly knit political machine. When in 1900, Susan B. Anthony, then 80, resigned as president, she was elected to succeed her. From then on, her time was primarily spent in speechmaking, planning campaigns, organizing women, and gaining political experience. 

One of her accomplishments was the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in 1902 which eventually reached into 32 other nations. But her husband’s health had been deteriorating and in 1904, she resigned as president of NAWSA to care for him. He died in 1905 followed in a relatively short span of time by her brother and Susan B. Anthony in 1906 and her mother in 1907.

Carrie’s grief was profound. But with encouragement she traveled internationally to work on IWSA activities. Eight years later she returned, noting that she and others “left the seeds of revolution behind us, and the hope of liberty in many souls. But we have got much more than we gave—an experience so upsetting to all our preconceived notions that it is difficult to estimate its influence upon us.” This is a particularly interesting observation given that, in the same year, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage—whose members included wealthy, influential women, Catholic clergymen, distillers and brewers, urban political machines, Southern congressmen and corporate capitalists—was organized. The battle lines were being set.

 

Though some states had enacted women’s suffrage, a national amendment was required. To get that, the suffrage movement needed a victory in the most populous state in the union—New York. It was at this point that what must have seemed like manna from heaven appeared. Mrs. Frank Leslie (Miriam Folline Leslie) bequeathed to Carrie nearly a million dollars to support the suffrage effort. The money was used to turn out an avalanche of articles and information with the slogan, “Victory in 1915.” Though their initial campaign failed, they rallied again with a slightly altered slogan, “Victory in 1917. This time they won.

When she had returned from her travels in 1915, Carrie again assumed leadership of what had become a badly disarrayed NAWSA organization. Less than a year later, she unveiled her “Winning Plan,” the intent of which was to campaign simultaneously for suffrage on the state and federal levels, and to compromise for partial suffrage in resistant states. In a speech entitled “The Crisis,” Catt noted: “Shall we play the coward, then, and leave the hard knocks for our daughters, or shall we throw ourselves into the fray, bare our own shoulders to the blows, and thus bequeath to them a politically liberated womanhood?”

In 1917, President Wilson involved a reluctant America in World War I. Carrie announced NAWSA’s support, even volunteering their services to the government if needed. Despite the astonishment and outrage of her pacifist friends and the Women’s Peace Party (which she helped found), she was, as usual, thinking ahead. If she backed the president in his time of need, she would have his ear and support of the suffrage cause. And if women could vote, then the potential for world peace would be increased.

By March 1919, Carrie, sensing victory, established the League of Women Voters at NAWSA’s 50th Anniversary Jubilee Convention. (The League would be NAWSA’s successor, helping women become educated voters.) And on June 4, the U.S. Senate passed the Nineteenth Amendment. “The last stage of the fight is to obtain ratification of the amendment so women may vote in the Presidential election in 1920,” Carrie declared. “This we are confident will be achieved. The friends of woman suffrage in both parties have carried out their word. In the result we can turn our backs upon the end of a long and arduous struggle, needlessly darkened and embittered by the stubbornness of a few at the expense of the many. ‘Eyes front’, is the watchword as we turn upon the struggle for ratification by the States.”
 
By the spring of 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, and all effort was then concentrated on winning the crucial 36th state. Carrie spent half of July and most of August 1920 in Tennessee. The heat was as fierce and unremitting as the struggle. “I have been flooded with anonymous letters, vulgar, ignorant, insane . . .,” Catt wrote in the Woman Citizen. “Even tricksters from the United States Revenue Service were there, operating against us . . . They appropriated our telegrams, tapped our telephones, listened outside our windows and transoms. They attacked our private and public lives.” Finally, on August 26, 1920, Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, originally proposed in 1878, and it became part of the Constitution.

Carrie's arrival in New York was cause for celebration. Even the New York Times, in its editorial of August 29, rejoiced: “It is almost cruel to recall the nineteenth century wit who offered to solve the suffrage question. It would suffice, he said, to permit all women to vote after thirty—the sly inference being that none would qualify. If the author of this merry jest is still alive, even he must find his taunt somewhat faded. Women in fighting for the vote have shown a passion of earnestness, a persistence, and above all a command of both tactics and strategy, which have amazed our master politicians. A new force has invaded public life and it is wielded by leaders who, whatever their foibles, perforce admit their three decades. A world that has hitherto recognized only the power of feminine youth and beauty is on its knees—no less—before the woman of thirty.”

It is startling and pleasing that their words echoed Abigail Adams’ letter from so long before: “. . . we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.” And perhaps Carrie had the best thoughts of all when she wrote: “Society has many ways of expressing its opinions and judgments on economic and political questions, but the tangible and ultimate plan is by the ballot. The ballot is a means of recording an individual opinion, which, when counted and computed with other individual opinions, recorded in the same authoritative way, shall indicate the aggregate public opinion on any given subject . . . The question to-day is not whether women desire to vote. But, is it better for society that men and women should vote together?”

Carrie’s life work didn’t end on August 26. She returned her attention to the IWSA and world peace. She also co-published Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement in 1923 and Why Wars Must Cease in 1935. She campaigned for American participation in the League of Nations, helped establish the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (CCCW) and the Protest Committee of Non-Jewish Women Against the Persecution of Jews in Germany as well as lobbied Congress to amend U.S. immigration laws to help Jews and other refugees.

Eighty years old at the beginning of World War II, she was unable to publicly campaign, but her energy never flagged. She continued writing to influential people about war refugees and peace almost until the day she died, at her home in New Rochelle, New York, in 1947, leaving for future generations of her citizen-daughters a “politically liberated womanhood.”

Bookmark specifications: We will march on to victory
Dimensions: 7 1/2” x 1 3/4” (including fringe)
Material: Silk
Manufacturer: Homemade
Date: Circa late 19th or early-20th century
Acquired: eBay