Victory: How Women Won It.
The First Hundred Years
Of The Modern Women’s Rights Movement
Catt, Carrie Chapman, foreword. The National American Woman Suffrage Association. Victory: How Women Won It. A Centennial Symposium 1840-1940. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1940.
8vo.; frontispiece photograph of jubilant suffragists, captioned, “Victory!”; full-page photographs of key suffrage leaders throughout; pages bright; blue endpapers, lightly tanned at hinges; medium blue cloth, spine stamped in gilt, front cover decorated with gilt figures of five women holding a banner reading “votes for women”; virtually unused.
First edition; 300 numbered copies, the entire edition. The volume, called the “Honor Edition,” was printed as a memorial to Margaret Perley Woodward, who had died the year before. An interesting publication in its own right, Victory contains full-page biographies of key suffragist figures, essays, and nine appendixes which include a bibliography, lists of members, directions for lobbyists, and other nuts-and-bolts material. A presentation copy, inscribed one month after publication: To Mrs. Edward Dreier from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Carrie Chapman Catt November 27, 1940.
Catt, who wrote the foreword to this volume, was the primary organizer of the feminist fight for the vote. This volume states that she
...turned by instinct to the suffrage movement and in 1890 became identified with the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her extraordinary genius for leadership caused Susan B. Anthony to choose Mrs. Catt to succeed her in the presidency when the old leader retired in 1900...she [Catt] was drafted in 1915 to lead the drive for the Federal Amendment...two million organized women took part under Mrs. Catt’s direction...Bitterly contested to the last ditch, the 19th Amendment was ratified August 26, 1920. (p. 146)
We speculate that the volume’s recipient, Mrs. Edward Dreier, was perhaps a relative of the women’s rights and labor activist Mary E. Dreier, although we have no corroborating evidence.
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