Carrie Chapman Catt becomes president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900.

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In 1900, Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) selects Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) to succeed her as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Catt had previously lived in Seattle, where in 1891 she was founding president of the Women's Century Club.

Catt served as president of the NAWSA from 1900 to 1904, when she stepped down to care for her ailing husband. She returned as president in 1915 and launched her "Winning Plan." It was a meticulously organized grassroots crusade to amend the constitution of the United States to grant women the right to vote. Following ratification of the Woman Suffrage Amendment on October 26, 1920, Catt transformed the NAWSA into the National League of Women Voters.

Sources:
Mildred Tanner Andrews, Woman's Place: A Guide to Seattle and King county History (Seattle: Gemil Press, 1994), 273-74; Sarah M. Evans, Born for Liberty: a History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 170-73, 187-90; J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Sound Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 50.

By Mildred Andrews, December 09, 1998

Carrie Lane Chapman Catt (1859-1947), woman suffrage leader, ca. 1883
Courtesy State Historical Society of Wisconsin