Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt was twice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the author of the Winning Plan of 1916, the strategy that finally coordinated the campaign by pressing the state legislatures and Congress at the same time and to a fixed timetable.
She lived from 1859 to 1947. Her contribution was organizational rather than oratorical: she took an association of state societies that had been running separate, uncoordinated referendum campaigns and aimed all of them at one target, the federal amendment, while using the state campaigns as the pressure that would move it.
What the Winning Plan of 1916 actually required
The Winning Plan of 1916 required every state association in the National American Woman Suffrage Association to sign a pledge and do the specific job Catt assigned it, rather than the job it preferred. Catt presented the plan at an emergency convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1916, in a closed session, and the delegates were asked to keep its contents to themselves so that the opposition could not see the schedule. The plan sorted the states into classes and gave each class a different task.
| Class of state | What its association was told to do | Why that task |
|---|---|---|
| States where a referendum could be won | Run a full suffrage referendum campaign, on the schedule set nationally | Each win added a bloc of women voters whose senators had to answer to them |
| States where a referendum could not be won | Press the legislature for presidential suffrage, the vote for president only | Many legislatures could grant it by statute, without amending the state constitution |
| Southern states | Press for primary suffrage, the vote in party primaries | In a one party region the primary decided the election, so the primary was the vote that counted |
| Every state without exception | Hold its own senators and representatives to a recorded position on the federal amendment | The amendment had to pass Congress before any state could ratify it |
The plan also fixed what the association would stop doing: spending money on states that could not deliver, letting a state association choose its own timing, and treating the federal amendment and the state campaigns as rival strategies. That last point is what most summaries miss. The Winning Plan did not replace state work with federal work. It used state work as the lever on Congress.
How Catt came to lead the association twice
Catt led the association twice because she resigned the first time and was called back. She had organized for the Iowa suffrage association and then headed the national organization committee, where she learned the trade she later applied to the whole country: canvassing a state district by district and counting the votes in advance. She succeeded Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the body formed in 1890 by the merger of the two rival associations, and her first term ended in 1904, when Anna Howard Shaw took the office and held it to 1915. Catt returned to the presidency in 1915 and kept it through ratification.
Between the terms she presided over the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and organized the New York City campaign, which taught her to build a suffrage organization on the pattern of a political machine: members enrolled by election district, a captain for each, and a card index of the voters to be worked on.
How the plan was worked between 1916 and 1920
Working the plan meant lobbying, and Catt's lobbying was record keeping. The association kept files on individual members of Congress, tracked their statements, and matched each against the suffrage strength in his own state. When the House and Senate came to the question, it could say who was committed and who was not, and could produce constituents to visit the ones who were not. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on 4 June 1919, and the ratification fight moved to the state legislatures, where the plan had already put organizations in place. Tennessee ratified on 18 August 1920, the thirty sixth state, completing ratification, and the amendment was certified on 26 August 1920.
Why Catt did not picket
Catt did not picket, and her association publicly dissociated itself from those who did. The Congressional Union, formed in 1913 and reorganized as the National Woman's Party in 1916 under Alice Paul, took the opposite view: that the party in power should be held responsible and confronted in public. The Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on 3 March 1913, staged by Paul the day before Wilson's inauguration, and the Silent Sentinels who began picketing the White House in January 1917 and kept it up for about two and a half years, belong to that wing. Pickets were arrested, imprisoned and force fed during hunger strikes. Catt's association went on lobbying the administration those pickets were denouncing, and argued that the picketing cost votes in Congress.
Which method actually produced the amendment is the oldest argument in the subject and it is not settled. What is documented is that both were running at once, that the two organizations detested each other, and that the men being lobbied by one were being embarrassed by the other in the same week. Catt set out her own version in Woman Suffrage and Politics, the book she wrote with Nettie Rogers Shuler after ratification; it is the winner's account. What was actually said at the time, in the convention reports and the printed speeches, is the check on it.
Who the Winning Plan left out
The plan left out Black women, and it did so deliberately, because the southern class of states could not be worked otherwise. The association's southern affiliates were white organizations, and the plan depended on their state legislatures for ratification. When the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs applied to affiliate with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the association asked it to withdraw the application, on the ground that admitting it would cost votes in the South. The campaign's earlier platform tradition, which reached back to speakers such as Sojourner Truth at Akron in 1851, had made no such calculation.
The consequence outlived the amendment, which bars the denial of the vote on account of sex and says nothing about anything else: the poll taxes, literacy tests and white primaries that kept Black citizens of both sexes from registering in the South were untouched by it. The poll tax in federal elections was not abolished until the Twenty Fourth Amendment in 1964, and the machinery was not dismantled until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What Catt did after 26 August 1920
After certification Catt converted the association into the League of Women Voters, on the argument that its job was now to teach the use of a vote it had spent decades demanding, and moved her own work to the international peace movement, chairing a committee of national women's organizations. She died in 1947. Two things are commonly credited to her that were not hers: the Washington procession of 3 March 1913 and the White House picketing that began in January 1917. Alice Paul organized both, and Catt opposed the second of them in writing.