The Woman's Hour

“Winning the vote required seventy-two years of ceaseless agitation by three generations of dedicated, fearless suffragists, who sought to overturn centuries of law and millennia of tradition concerning gender roles. The women who launched the movement were dead by the time it was completed; the women who secured its final success weren’t born when it began.” 

The central premise of the book is that history and popular belief have glossed over the Herculean effort required to gain the vote for American women. Women’s suffrage wasn’t simply a political issue; it struck at the heart of patriarchal civilization itself. 

“For Carrie Catt, woman suffrage was not simply a political goal; it was nothing less than the next logical step in the moral evolution of humankind.” 

Catt sees her work as a divine calling. She assumes that after gaining the vote, women will somehow uplift the entire political arena and end global warfare. The reality of women voting as individuals, not en bloc, will eventually contradict her pacifist convictions. 

“To her mind it was a stupid argument: the Memphis ladies didn’t like the Nashville and Chattanooga ladies; their noses were out of joint because Memphis hadn’t been chosen for the 1914 NAWSA convention. It wasn’t about tactics or ideology or anything significant; it was a catfight, plain and simple.” 

Catt assesses the suffrage movement in Tennessee just prior to the ratification battle. Although factionalism has also plagued the national organizations of NAWSA and NWP, the parochial interests of the three state regions may do even more harm to suffrage because of their tendency to get bogged down in trivialities.