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A Woman’s Right to Vote Was Secured After Work That Was Inspired by Mothers and Driven by Maternal Instincts
Key takeaways
- That moment set Catt on her path: a life dedicated to the women’s suffrage movement that culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment.
- Anthony inherited the reformist instincts of her Quaker household, and her mother managed a New York farm that became a hub for abolitionist organizing.
- A generation after Stanton and Anthony, in the 1890s, Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights strategist and educator, became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and later helped found the NAACP.
Library of Congress As a young girl growing up on an Iowa farm after the Civil War, Carrie Chapman Catt was so swept up in the presidential election of 1872 that she named her kittens after the candidates (one of the less comely furballs was dubbed Ulysses S. Grant). But when Election Day arrived, she was horrified to see her mother left behind as her father drove off with the farmhands in the family’s three-seated buggy to the polls. “I was astonished that my mother did not go to vote,” she recalled, “and shocked when she told me she had no legal right to do so.”
That moment set Catt on her path: a life dedicated to the women’s suffrage movement that culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment. Looking back on her achievements, she later wrote: “I could never forget that rank injustice to my mother.”
Though we often speak of the “mothers of suffrage” in a metaphorical sense, Catt’s story points to a more literal lineage as well: Suffrage succeeded because mothers who lacked any formal political power nonetheless inspired and shaped the work that secured it for their daughters and granddaughters.