A Woman’s Right to Vote Was Secured After Work That Was Inspired by Mothers and Driven by Maternal Instincts

In a poignant pattern, many of the most important contributions to suffrage were enacted—or inspired—by mothers

Lucia Graves

Summer 2026

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As a young girl growing up on an Iowa farm after the Civil War, Carrie Chapman Catt was so swept up in the presidential election of 1872 that she named her kittens after the candidates (one of the less comely furballs was dubbed Ulysses S. Grant). But when Election Day arrived, she was horrified to see her mother left behind as her father drove off with the farmhands in the family’s three-seated buggy to the polls. “I was astonished that my mother did not go to vote,” she recalled, “and shocked when she told me she had no legal right to do so.”

That moment set Catt on her path: a life dedicated to the women’s suffrage movement that culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment. Looking back on her achievements, she later wrote: “I could never forget that rank injustice to my mother.” 

Though we often speak of the “mothers of suffrage” in a metaphorical sense, Catt’s story points to a more literal lineage as well: Suffrage succeeded because mothers who lacked any formal political power nonetheless inspired and shaped the work that secured it for their daughters and granddaughters.

Susan B. Anthony inherited the reformist instincts of her Quaker household, and her mother managed a New York farm that became a hub for abolitionist organizing. Though Anthony herself never married or had children, she became something of a second mother to the children of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, caring for them so Stanton could write. All seven of those children lived to adulthood, and Stanton’s youngest daughter, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, extended her mother’s legacy in a new direction by organizing wage-earning women to take mass political action and urging wealthy women to march alongside them.

A generation after Stanton and Anthony, in the 1890s, Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights strategist and educator, became the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and later helped found the NAACP. Terrell wrote admiringly of her mother, a successful businesswoman born enslaved, who insisted her daughter receive the higher education she’d been denied. “I lift up my heart in gratitude to my dear mother for her foresight and for the sacrifice she made in my behalf,” Terrell later wrote.

For Alice Paul, the radical strategist who co-founded the National Woman’s Party and led the White House pickets that helped force the suffrage amendment onto the national agenda in the 1910s, support for women’s suffrage had been taken for granted in her childhood home. Paul recalled her mother regularly bringing her to suffrage meetings, where she absorbed the value of uncompromising persistence. “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row,” Paul recalled her mother advising.

By 1916, Catt was orchestrating the campaign that would carry the movement across the finish line. Her “Winning Plan” mapped a swift, state-by-state push for ratification by three-quarters of American state legislatures, as required to amend the Constitution.

In the summer of 1920, 35 states had approved the amendment, one short of the number required. In Tennessee, the State Senate had approved the amendment, but the House was split, with a procedural vote tied at 48-48—a single vote shy of the necessary majority.

Then, Harry Burn, a 24-year-old Republican representative, reversed his antisuffrage position at the last moment. It was, of course, a mother who tipped the balance. “Vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt,” Phoebe “Febb” Burn wrote to her son. “Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt.” As Burn wrote in a statement entered into the official record of the Tennessee House of Representatives: “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.” 

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Lucia Graves is a freelance features writer based in Maine.