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
Famous quotes containing the words suffrage association, national, american, woman, suffrage and/or association:
“... 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)
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I will put in my poems, that with you is heroism, upon land and sea—And
I will report all heroism from an American point of view.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Say the woman is forty-four.
Say she is five seven-and-a-half.
Say her hair is stick color.
Say her eyes are chameleon.
Would you put her in a sack and bury her,
suck her down into the dumb dirt?”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Gentlemen, those confederate flags and our national standard are what has made this union great. In what other country could a man who fought against you be permitted to serve as judge over you, be permitted to run for reelection and bespeak your suffrage on Tuesday next at the poles.”
—Laurence Stallings (1894–1968)
“It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist’s work ever produced.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)