Carrie Chapman Catt

Chapter I CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT

It was Feb. 21, 1920. Though Carrie Chapman Catt could not announce victory yet while addressing an audience at the Congress Hotel in Chicago, she knew it was near. It had felt a long time to some since June 1919, when Congress submitted the 19th Amendment to the states for ratification. “Be Joyful Today” was her hype speech to the women fighting for suffrage around the country. Stay focused, she encouraged, while state legislatures ratify the amendment. Stay focused on our ideal and we women, she promised, will win the right to vote.

“Some day the history of these past few months will be written and if the writer catches the real spirit of it all it will be a thrilling story.” CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT

“Suragists were never dismayed when they were a tiny group and all the world against them. What care they now when all the world is with them? March on, suragists — the victory is yours.”

Much of that victory was owed to Carrie herself, a leader and strategist for the women’s suffrage movement. Born in 1859, Carrie was a barrierbreaking woman in so many ways.

“The enemies of progress and liberty never surrender and never die. Ever since the days of cave men, they have stood ready with their sledge hammers to strike any liberal idea on the head whenever it appeared. They are still active, hysterically active over our amendment, still imagining as their progenitors for thousands of years have done, that a y sitting on the wheel of progress may command it to revolve no more and that it will obey. The trail has been long and winding; the struggle has been tedious and wearying, you made sacri ces and received many hard knocks. Be joyful today.” — Catt

Enemies of progress and liberty were no match for Carrie, the strategist behind the plan that secured women the right to vote. She was a national suffrage leader who wrote speeches, organized volunteers, traveled the country and built what would become the winning strategy for suffrage.

“We may be a bit impatient but candor should make us realize that the progress of ratication has been safe, sane, wholesome and its nal triumph certain. We We should be glad and grateful today but more we should be proud, sh ud, proud that the 51 years of organized endeavor have been clean, p n, constructive, conscientious. Our army never resorted to lies, s, innuendoes, misrepresentation. It never called its enemies names. In all the years it has never paid a federal lobbyist and n nd so far as I know no state has paid a legislative lobbyist. During s ng the 50 years it has rarely had a salaried ocer and even then n she has been paid less than her earning capacity elsewhere. It It has been an army of volunteers who have estimated no sacrice h ce too great, no service too dicult.”

When Carrie became the leader of the suffrage movement for the second time, she unleashed her strategic secret sauce, the “Winning Plan,” a two-pronged approach to winning the right to vote; invest time and energy in the states that would ratify the 19th Amendment, while at the same time lobby in Washington for Congress to introduce the amendment to the states.

“Ours has been a movement with a soul, a dauntless, unconquerable soul ever leading on. Women came, served and passed on, but others came to take their places while the same great soul was ever marching on through hundreds, nay a thousand years. A soul immortal directing, leading the woman crusade for the liberation of the Mothers of the Race. That soul is here today and who shall say that all the hosts of the millions of women who have toiled and hoped and met delay are not here today and joining in the rejoicing of their cause at last, at last has won its triumph.”

The ‘Winning Plan’ worked, and Catt is credited, with a few other leaders, for the introduction of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“Women be glad today. Let your voices ring out the gladness in your hearts. There will never come another day like this. Let the joy be unconned and let it speak so clearly that its echo will be heard around the world and nd its way into the soul of every woman of any and every race and nationality who is yearning for opportunity and liberty still denied her sex.”