The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an American women's rights organization formed in May 1890 as a unification of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The NAWSA continued the work of both associations by becoming the parent organization of hundreds of smaller local and state groups, and by helping to pass woman suffrage legislation at the state and local level. The NAWSA was the largest and most important suffrage organization in the United States, and was the primary promoter of women's right to vote. Like AWSA and NWSA before it, the NAWSA pushed for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women's voting rights, and was instrumental in winning the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920.
Susan B. Anthony was the dominant figure in NAWSA from 1890 to 1900, at which time she stepped down in favor of Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt was president of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 onward. Anna Howard Shaw was president of NAWSA from 1904 to 1915. After success in 1920, the NAWSA was reformed as the League of Women Voters, which continues the legacy.
Read more about National American Woman Suffrage Association: Background Conflict, Merger, Gaining The Vote, Presidents of The NAWSA
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“... woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself ... we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man ...”
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1886)
“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faltering step, and slow; but this lingering pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring.”
—Frances Trollope (1780–1863)
“Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“... a large portion of those who demand woman suffrage are persons who have not been trained to reason, and are chiefly guided by their generous sensibilities.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“In this great association we know no North, no South, no East, no West. This has been our pride for all these years. We have no political party. We never have inquired what anybody’s religion is. All we ever have asked is simply, “Do you believe in perfect equality for women?” This is the one article in our creed.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)