CATT, Carrie Chapman Speech Article, Book File Article: “what Next?”

[*1919*]
[*Am Legion
Weekly*]
WHAT NEXT?
By Carrie Chapman Catt, President
National American Woman Suffrage Association
Tennessee has put the cap-stone on woman's freedom.  It has
triumphantly closed the sixty years of women's struggle for the right 
to have their prayers counted on election day.  The gallant men of 
the Volunteer State unafraid of the noisy threats meant to intimidate
have opened at last the long-locked door through which millions of 
grateful women will pass to political freedom.  In this hour of victory
there is but one regret and that is that every man and woman in 
the nation does not share our joy.  Today there are those yet too
blinded by prejudice to recognize the justice and inevitability of 
woman suffrage, but tomorrow we know that we shall work together for
the common good of this great and glorious nation."
What will women do with the vote?
They will do very much what they have been doing with it, for 
suffrage for women is not experimental.  Women have voted for fifty-one
years in Wyoming, for twenty-seven years in Colorado and New 
Zealand; for nearly a quarter of a century in Idaho and Utah; for
eighteen years in Federated Australia; for fourteen in Finland; for 
seven in Norway.  In all these lands women have sought and gained
specific reforms by means of the ballot.  Without the ballot, they 
confess that their efforts at reform have been unfruitful.
Through the fifty years of the fight for federal suffrage in 
this country, suffragists have found it increasingly hard to go on 
working for the vote when there were so many things they wanted to do 
with the vote.
Since votes for women is now an accomplished fact, what are the 
women going to do with the vote?

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Are they going to draw back their skirts in disdain from all
interest in politics on the ground that it is corrupt?
Are they going to join the army of kid-gloved men slackers
whom I have heard proudly boast that they would not touch politics 
with a ten-inch pole?
Or, are they going to be of those who will help swell 
America's army of voters, who put conscience and thought into the
scales with party politics and party candidates?
In order to help the new woman voter find her way through the 
maze of these besetting questions there has been formed the National
League of Women Voters.  In each state, state branches are forming 
out of the old suffrage associations.  This League is not partisan,
it is pan-partisan, all partisan.  A woman can be a member of it and 
yet be a member of any political party she may choose, exactly as she 
may be a member of it and be a member of any church she may choose.
This year the League of Women Voters proposed the first
woman's platform to both the major parties.  That is to say a platform 
including subjects upon which women, because of their experience as
mothers, homemakers and wage-earners, have a distinctive point of view.
The first plank was concerned with child welfare, because that 
interest is foremost in the minds of women.
The League of Women Voters is not encouraging women to leave
their parties, for it is through the political parties that we must 
work.  They furnish us with the machinery through which we are 
enabled to reach the public, keep the public informed, through which
the public consciousness is created.  "Get into the parties" was the
slogan adopted by the League at the Chicago convention.
Neither state nor nation should temporize with the problems
of government before them.  Lynchings, compelling the kissing of the

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American flag, deportation are not meeting the situation. The nation is suffering from having so long kept the tools of government from women. Home means more to women than it ever can to man. Since the earliest forms of civilization when a dug-out with its wood fires was the center of the home, women with her children has been the defender of that spot and she will continue to defend it to the last.
We must set our strong American shoulders against intolerance wherever it may be. Intolerance anywhere will cause the crumbling of any foundation. The great war was the result of many causes, but after all the one great cause was intolerance. No sooner has one step of freedom been gained, than those who suffered from intolerance, themselves become intolerant and try to prevent the next step. Let us unite upon that principle and give our efforts, our every thought and energy to making this everybody's world.

Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.