Ratification

Chapter 1 describes two national suffrage organizations’ efforts, in the final years prior to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. It highlights the split between members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), over whether a state-by-state approach to suffrage, or a federal suffrage amendment, was the best strategy to achieve the vote for women. That split caused Alice Paul to form a separate organization, the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The chapter foreshadows how that deep division had an impact on the constitutional development of the federal suffrage amendment, after its eventual ratification in 1920.