Woman suffragists needed to develop a way for women to win
the vote without upsetting the balance of the sexes. The campaign that emerged
in the twentieth century drew upon existing gender relations and promoted a
vision of women voters as nonthreatening and decidedly feminine. The pervasive
fear of gender role inversions had handicapped the cause throughout much of the
nineteenth century. As suffragists came to understand what underlying fears the
public held, they curbed their public image to relegate those anxieties. In the
first years of the twentieth century NAWSA reshaped its relationship with the
American public.

Historian Steven M. Buechler argued in Women’s Movements in the United States that the last two decades of
the nineteenth century, a period referred to as the doldrums by Aileen
Kraditor, were in fact, a period in which the national suffrage movement
underwent revision so that an organized, efficient, and competent political
group emerged in the twentieth century with full vigor and focus to reshape the
minds of the American public, and to win the vote.[1] Whether
or not the 1880s and 1890s served as a staging period for American suffragists,
clearly, something had changed at the turn of the century. The movement began
appealing to the public, rooting itself in the nation’s mind. Instead of
Stanton and Anthony’s revolution, twentieth century suffragists wanted a
campaign that enshrined the virtues of women. They wanted to win the vote, not
equality.

To develop their own modern approach to winning public
support suffragists defined their own media image and a vision of who woman
voters could be. As a result, suffrage media became an expression of feminine
virtue as women took to the streets, to the silver screen, and to the front
page. They implored the public to give women the vote, not because women and
men were equal, but because women were special. Women, they argued, could use
their natural abilities as wives, mothers, and nurturers to elevate society; the
female sex was imbued with virtues that were absent from the corrupt political
system. To promote this new argument, woman suffragists focused on this
traditional view of women.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the woman’s suffrage
movement was confined to a relatively small circle of elite women. The National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had formed in 1890 with the
combination of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the
American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA). The organization held closed
meetings and small conferences annually. Overall though, the national
organization was fairly small. The leader of the organization in 1900 was
Carrie Chapman Catt. Her campaign was one that pandered to white, middle-class
audiences. She advocated woman’s suffrage to counteract the “foreign ignorant
vote which was sought to be brought up by each party.”[2]

Catt appealed to middle-class audiences by criticizing
corruption and promoting nativism. Her views on race were common among the
Progressive Era reformers who supported eugenics. Catt was quoted as calling
Native Americans savages and suggesting to Southern senators suffrage could be
a stepping stone toward white supremacy. At the same time that Catt was
advocating the rise of woman’s suffrage many states were implementing a series
of laws to disenfranchise black male
voters. These Jim Crow laws included poll taxes and literacy tests as measures
of whether or not a citizen could vote. Ultimately, these measures nearly
eliminated the voting power of African Americans, which helped suffragists like
Catt convince supporters that enfranchising women, would not mean letting black
women vote.

Catt argued that one of the reasons many people were
reluctant to give women the vote was because of the “inertia in the growth of democracy which
has come as a reaction following the aggressive movements that with possibly
ill-advised haste enfranchised the foreigner, the Negro and the Indian.”[3]
She argued that by granting the vote to these questionable groups the public
had become wary of allowing women the vote. But she believed that the piety and
moral superiority of females would counteract the negative impact of these
questionable characters. Certainly, Catt aligned herself closely to the
eugenics cause. She invested in making suffrage an approachable, white,
middle-class movement. Catt worked against the fear of anarchy that was
prevalent among reformers. Where the nineteenth century suffragists had set
themselves apart as revolutionaries in need of drastic change, Catt and others
poised suffrage as a way to combat the most radical elements of society, which,
for many white, middle-class Americans under the thrall of eugenics, meant sharp
racial divisions.

Membership in NAWSA was 13,150 in 1893, but by 1915 the
organization brought together over 100,000 women to campaign for the vote.[4]  NAWSA developed a compelling political
strategy that renounced the radicalism of early suffragists, while it played
with all the things that made the twentieth century modern. NAWSA supported the
long-standing practice of campaigning for suffrage on a state by state basis.
The moderate and gradual approach had been the only successful element of the
nineteenth century with a number of state suffrage victories in the West. NAWSA
actively tried to engage with state suffrage associations to help them build a
federation of woman suffragists. The organization approached local woman’s
clubs like the Chicago Political Equality League, the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union, and the Women’s Trade Union League. Suffrage was swelling in
popularity as NAWSA appealed to elite clubwomen from across the nation. NAWSA
hoped that by building a tight-knit network of supporters, they could gradually
win over the entire nation’s support.