As we celebrate the centennial of both the Nineteenth Amendment and the League of Women Voters, it’s good to remember where we have come from and where we are going. Here is a brief summary of the League’s history. Read more at LWVUS, https://www.lwv.org/about-us/history.
Carrie Chapman Catt
During the 1919 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a committee was formed, conceptualized by Carrie Chapman Catt and chaired by Jane Brooks, to establish the future of the suffrage movement. The League of Women Voters was officially founded in Chicago in 1920, just six months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and women won the vote.
Maud Wood Park was elected as the first president of the League. The League quickly began to spread throughout the nation, and by 1924 there were Leagues organized in 346 of 433 congressional districts. The League quickly got involved with influencing policy and began advocating support for the Cable Act, also known as the Married Women’s Independent Nationality Act, which became law in 1922 and preserved U.S. citizenship for women who married foreigners. Around this time the League also sponsored its first “Get Out the Vote” campaign.
League membership has waxed and waned over the years, falling during the Great Depression and ensuing war years, but it has always inspired its grass-roots volunteers to work toward the practice and expansion of the tools of democracy. It played a key role as a consultant to the U.S. United Nations Charter Conference in 1945, established The National Voter in the 1950s, escalated its support for equal access to education, employment, and voting rights during the 1960s, worked to advance the Equal Rights Amendment and expanded its environmental protection positions during the 1970s, extended membership to men in 1974, worked for the passage of the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1982, played a major role in the enactment of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, pressured the Senate to ratify the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1988, sponsored Emmy Award–winning presidential debates, and has continually advocated for voting rights legislation such as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Help America Vote and Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Acts of 2002, and myriad measures to fight voting restrictions (such as gerrymandering) that affect marginalized populations. A natural outgrowth of the League’s progressive and inclusive positions has been the League’s current and ongoing commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
The League remains a nonpartisan organization that has inspired the hard work of thousands of volunteers and continues to be recognized as a force in shaping informed public policy and promoting citizen participation in the democratic process at all levels of government.
