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The fortunes donated and estates left by wealthy women played a significant, yet controversial role in recharging the woman suffrage movement and passing the Nineteenth Amendment, a story historians have just recently begun to explore. "Following the money" traces priorities, tactics, and strategies of the movement through a focus on donors and donations and explores the resentment caused when a small number of wealthy individuals wielded the power to shape strategy and decisions. Their experience with the power of money (and its limitations) helped them understand that economic independence and political equality was crucial for all women, whether working-class wage earners, educated professionals, or inheritors of large fortunes. Their donations funded new tactics and strategies, including headquarters in New York and Washington, DC, salaries for traveling organizers, and a publicity blitz, as well as Carrie Chapman Catt's "winning plan," ultimately making passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment possible in 1920.
Calling it "the vital power of all movements-the wood and water of the engine," the "ammunition of war," and a "war chest," suffragists in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States captured the importance of money in their battle to win the right to vote for women.1 They were unable to change public sentiment or to lobby legislatures without funds for travel, staff, print, or parades. The movement depended not just on grassroots activism, but also on the fortunes donated and estates left by a handful of very wealthy women.2 At crucial moments their contributions sustained the western state campaigns, underwrote newspapers, or paid salaries. This article argues that the movement, which by 1900 was stalled and unable to pass suffrage in any new states, emerged from the "doldrums," due to the infusion of money given by wealthy women. I contend that their donations shaped the trajectory-the priorities, strategies, and ultimately the success-of the movement.
This article also wrestles with the difficulty of engaging with the essential role of wealthy women who had the ability to dominate a movement that challenged men's political dominance. When funding came from a small number of affluent individuals, officers and staff sometimes felt pressured to shape their agendas to please donors. Therefore, resentment influenced the story told in memoirs and the History of Woman Suffrage series...