Having celebrated the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, League leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt took a collective deep breath and began planning for the future. This excerpt from Forty Years of a Great Idea, the League’s anniversary booklet for 1960, summarizes some of their thinking.

Dr. Anna Shaw and League founder Carrie Chapman Catt lead more than 20,000 suffragists down New York's Fifth Avenue in 1915. (Library of Congress)

In 1919 Mrs. Catt said: “We propose to get into the great parties and to work from the inside. We do not fear issues, and we do not fear the future. We’ll not vote as women, but as American citizens, and we are unafraid.”

In 1920 she said: “If we are going to trail behind the Democratic and Republican parties about five years, and if our program is going to be about that much behind that of the dominant political parties, we might as well quit before we begin. If the League of Women Voters hasn’t the vision to see what is coming and what ought to come, and be five years ahead of the political parties, I doubt if it is worth the trouble to go on!

On the same occasion Mrs. Catt said the League should have three chief aims: 1. To use its utmost influence to secure the final enfranchisement of the women of every state in our own republic and to reach out across the seas in aid of the woman’s struggle for her own in every land; 2. To remove the remaining legal discriminations against women in the codes and constitutions of the several states in order that the feet of coming women may find these stumbling blocks removed; 3. To make our democracy so safe for the nation and so safe for the world that every citizen may feel secure and great men will acknowledge the worthiness of the American republic to lead.

—Elsa Pendleton, Compiler