Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Cattwas an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and was the founder of the League of Women Voters and the International Alliance of Women. She "led an army of voteless women in 1919 to pressure Congress to pass the constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth9 January 1859
CountryUnited States of America
Carrie Chapman Catt quotes about
When a just cause reaches its flood-tide...whatever stands in its way must fall before its overwhelming force.
White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage.
it was the United States which first established general suffrage for men upon the two principles that 'taxation without representation is tyranny' and that governments to be just should 'derive their consent from the governed.' The unanswerable logic of these two principles is responsible for the extension of suffrage to men and women the world over. In the United States, however, women are still taxed without 'representation' and still live under a government to which they have given no 'consent.
The answer to one is the answer to all. Government by 'the people' is expedient or it is not. If it is expedient, then obviously all the people must be included.
The struggle for the vote was an effort to bring men to feel less superior and women to feel less inferior.
If we learn from the experience, there is no failure, only delayed victory.
To get that word, male, out of the Constitution, cost the women of this country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign; 56 state referendum campaigns; 480 legislative campaigns to get state suffrage amendments submitted; 47 state constitutional convention campaigns; 277 state party convention campaigns; 30 national party convention campaigns to get suffrage planks in the party platforms; 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses to get the federal amendment submitted, and the final ratification campaign.
Do not stand in the way of the next step in human progress. No one living who reads the signs of the times but realizes that woman suffrage must come. We are working for the ballot as a matter of justice and as a step for human betterment.
The world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility, and then called her weak. It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men and when, to gain it, she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain.
Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history, and wage such a fight for liberty that the whole world will respect our sex.
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The vote has been costly. Prize it...understand what it means and what it can do for your country.
To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.
Service to a just cause rewards the worker with more real happiness and satisfaction than any other venture of life.