ABSTRACT
With the imminent passage of the Nineteenth Amendment before her, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Carrie Chapman Catt urged delegates at the 1919 Jubilee Convention of the organization to continue working together even after the victorious culmination of the suffrage campaign. To encourage future organizational work on the part of suffragists, Catt told of a literacy crisis threatening American political life. Caught up in the nationalistic fervor of world war, Catt proclaimed illiteracy, particularly among immigrant groups, a force “more menacing to the future security of our country than any other” (A Nation Calls 8). Illiterates, Catt argued, provided “hothouse growth potential” for foreign espionage. Catt also constructed those not able to read and write in English as threats to the progress of political institutions because, she suggested, they provided fodder for corrupt political party men: “Not only would woman suffrage have been established many years ago, but political corruption… would have been stamped out in all its worst manifestations long ago, had these millions not offered dangerous temptations to unscrupulous men”(13). To fight the “menace of illiteracy,” the NAWSA, Catt argued, should reconfigure itself as a League of Women Voters that would profess literacy in English and, concurrently, spread the ideals of American democracy. According to Catt, only by promoting this particular kind of literacy would newly enfranchised women witness an improvement in the political systems to which they were finally gaining access.
