National American Woman Suffrage Association

The National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa), founded in 1890, united two suffragist organizations that had pursued opposing policies in the years after the Civil War. The National Woman Suffrage Association (nwsa), founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1869, had agitated for a federal constitutional amendment that would give women the vote, whereas the American Woman Suffrage Association (awsa), organized the same year by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others, sought action through the state legislatures.

The two policies represented more than differing tactics. The nwsa's insistence on immediate federal action brought the women's movement into direct competition with the campaign for black male suffrage. The awsa, on the other hand, recommended that women should not seek federal action until the campaign for black suffrage had been won. But after this goal was achieved with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, it became clear that the Republican party would not take up the fight for woman suffrage as the awsa had hoped. Residual bitterness between the two woman suffrage groups kept them apart for another twenty years, but the primary division over the Fifteenth Amendment no longer applied, and the two groups united in the nawsa in 1890.

Under Cady and Stanton, the nwsa had expressed an assertive feminism, advocating a broad range of rights for women. With the amalgamation into nawsa, the women's movement became both more focused and more conservative, seeking only the vote and often justifying it in terms of women's "purifying" influence rather than their inherent equality with men. Between 1890 and 1896, Wyoming and Utah entered the Union with woman suffrage in their constitutions, and Colorado and Idaho approved it by referenda. But over the next fourteen years, although suffragists launched 480 campaigns to get the question on other state ballots, they achieved only a handful of referenda and won none of them. But the situation began to change in 1910. Carrie Chapman Catt, former president of nawsa, gave new life to the suffrage movement, aggressively organizing state campaigns that reached beyond nawsa's traditional middle-class base to include immigrant and working-class women.

Between 1910 and 1912, half a dozen states gave women the vote, and more followed each year. At the same time, the suffrage movement was getting broader support from national reform groups, and in Washington the fiery Congressional Union, led by Alice Paul, was bringing the militant tactics of British suffragists to a campaign for a federal amendment. Although the Congressional Union's abrasiveness offended the nawsa leadership, it also spurred them to action.

In 1915, Catt organized nawsa's "Winning Plan," based on the principle that each state that gave women the vote could then be pressed to support the effort on the federal level. Catt herself cultivated President Woodrow Wilson, ultimately winning his support. In 1919, with twenty-six state legislatures petitioning Congress on behalf of woman suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment passed by a large majority. It was proclaimed ratified in 1920. Thereafter, nawsa disbanded, but many of its leaders were active in the founding of the League of Women Voters in the same year.

See also American Woman Suffrage Association; Anthony, Susan B.; Catt, Carrie Chapman; National Woman Suffrage Association; Paul, Alice; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Suffrage.