Journal of Women's History

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.