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)
“Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don’t take their children there sense obscurely that they have failed in some fundamental way, like Muslims who never made it to Mecca.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
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—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“An illustrious individual remarks that Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton is the salt, Anna Dickinson the pepper, and Miss [Susan B.] Anthony the vinegar of the Female Suffrage movement. The very elements get the “white male” into a nice pickle.”
—Anonymous, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Revolution (August 19, 1869)
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—Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)