Library of Congress



[Detail] Yellow ribbon from 1911 Suffrage Parade

This online collection contains 167 items from the larger National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. The selected items include many important texts from the beginning of the movement for women's right to vote through 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. The collection shows a wide variety of opinions and strategies that helped win voting rights for women.

1) Woman Suffrage

Carrie Chapman Catt

Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt. (In 1920, after the 36th state had ratified.)

In 1938, Carrie Chapman Catt, a key coordinator in the woman suffrage movement, donated her collection of woman suffrage materials to the Library of Congress. Her collection chronicles the movement to gain the vote for women. Most of the materials are from speeches and meetings of activists, both women and men, who argued for and against woman suffrage.

Search on the names of well-known people who campaigned for women's right to vote including Susan B. Anthony, Henry Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone.

For example, search on Lucy Stone for text such as,

Gentlemen will see it is no new claim that women are making. They only ask for the practical application of admitted, self-evident truths. If "all political power is inherent in the people," why have women, who are more than half the entire population of this State, no political existence? Is it because they are not people?... Women are even held to be citizens without the full rights of citizenship, but to bear the burden of "taxation without representation," which is "tyranny."

From "Woman Suffrage in New Jersey. An address by Lucy Stone at a hearing before the New Jersey Legislature, March 6, 1867."