National American Woman Suffrage Association

National American Woman Suffrage Association. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was founded in 1890, healing the split among the suffrage forces that had occurred in 1869 and joining together the National Woman Suffrage Association (headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony), and Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association. Initially, the new organization failed to make many gains, either at the state or the national level.This was a conservative era, but the problems were internal as well. The NAWSA's key early leader, Anna Howard Shaw, first as vice president (1892–1900) under Anthony and then as president (1904–1915), was a gifted orator but a poor administrator and strategist and essentially conservative in many of her social views. Thus, in this early period, the NAWSA was sometimes identified with conservative political positions, anti‐immigrant pronouncements, and even, among its southern members, racist views. Around 1910, however, a new group of younger, more progressive leaders emerged, mostly in state branches and sometimes influenced by the British militant suffrage leaders. Including Harriot Stanton Blatch of New York, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they introduced such dynamic tactics as parades, rallies, aggressive lobbying, and alliances with working‐class groups, and they won notable successes. Before 1910, women could vote in only four states: Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho; between 1910 and 1914, six states were added: Illinois, Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon.

While the NAWSA focused on state referenda, the Quaker Alice Paul (1885–1977), closely following the English example, split with the NAWSA in 1913 to found the Congressional Union. Her organization focused on congressional passage of the long‐dormant woman‐suffrage amendment to the Constitution. In 1916 the Congressional Union regrouped into the Woman's party and began a campaign to unseat antisuffrage legislators in state elections.

Relations between the much larger NAWSA and the Woman's party were generally cordial until the war year 1917, when the NAWSA, led by the dynamic and tireless Carrie Chapman Catt, disavowed the militancy of the Woman's party as members of the latter group picketed the White House; were arrested and jailed; and, embarking on hunger strikes, were force‐fed.

The NAWSA strongly supported the war effort during World War I, maintaining a hospital in France and supporting the work of Shaw and Catt on the Women's Committee of the Council for National Defense and of Blatch as an official of the Food Administration. Meanwhile, however, the organization also continued its steady work for woman suffrage, following Catt's “Winning Plan” announced in 1916. This plan involved tight national discipline combined with forceful grassroots agitation to increase the number of states with women's suffrage and to pressure congressmen, senators, and state legislators to support the suffrage amendment in Congress and, later, during the state ratification process. The plan succeeded. The Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920, whereupon, the NAWSA became the League of Women Voters.
See also Feminism; Progressive Era; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Eleanor Flexner , Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, 1959, revised ed., 1975.
Ellen C. DuBois , Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, 1997.

Lois W. Banner