Guest post: Correcting the record about Carrie Chapman Catt

I appreciate Sam Cohen January 12, 2026, essay, “All about Arabella Mansfield and 3 other Iowa women to made history.” These women’s remarkable achievements and fights for justice deserve to be recognized and celebrated.

Yet I must object to Cohen’s third paragraph in her discussion of Carrie Chapman Catt where she writes:

When speaking about the accomplishments of Carrie Chapman Catt, it’s equally important to draw attention to the fact that women of color were not granted the right to vote when the amendment was adopted, despite the fact that they also fought for this right during the women’s suffrage movement. …

Cohen then goes on to list when women of various racial identities were eventually enfranchised through state or federal action. Cohen’s essay implies that somehow Catt is at fault for these injustices and that the 19th Amendment fell short of its promises. Both implications are untrue. 

Carrie Chapman Catt opposed any effort to limit the 19th Amendment to white women only, either through allowing states to confer voting rights or by inserting the word “white” into the amendment. Rather, everyone understood that the 19th Amendment would apply to all women, regardless of race. The 19th Amendment’s universality was the basis of many Southerners’ opposition to the 19th Amendment precisely because it would enfranchise Black women. 

In fact, about 500,000 Black women lived outside the American South in 1920 and were able to vote in that year’s elections. By 1960, over two million Black women lived outside the American South where they were free of the Jim Crow laws of the South. Even in 1920, Black women successfully registered in Virginia and South Carolina, and in the 1930s, Mary McLeod Bethune rose to national prominence because of her efforts to help Black men and women pass the required literacy tests. 

Moreover, Black, Asian, and Native women experienced barriers to voting not because of some failure of the 19th Amendment, but because Congress failed to confer citizenship on their racial or ethnic group or because it failed to enforce the provisions of the 15th Amendment. For her part, Carrie Chapman Catt was a member of the “Committee of 100” in New York that petitioned Congress to fully enforce the 15th Amendment. She also advocated to restore the voting rights of Hawai’ian women who were disenfranchised when Hawai’i became a US territory. 

None of the constitutional amendments that expand voting rights cured every voting rights ill. The 15th Amendment did not include women of any race. The 23rd Amendment applied only to the District of Columbia but no other US territories. The 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes but not other voting barriers. The 26th Amendment does not apply to felons, even after they have paid their debt to society. 

The 19th Amendment, pushed to ratification by Iowan Carrie Chapman Catt, remains the single largest expansion of voting rights in American in American history, impacting 26 million American women in 1920 and 122 million American women today.

Karen M. Kedrowski is the director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University.