By the early 1900s, having played central roles in the successful fights to give women the vote in Idaho and Colorado, Carrie Chapman Catt commanded the admiration of woman suffrage workers across the country. But her greatest achievement was yet to come. As leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she molded this languishing organization into a finely tuned machine and armed it with a winning strategy. The result-some seventy years after the suffrage movement began-was the final ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, guaranteeing all American women the right to vote.
The maker of Catt's likeness, Mary Foote, studied in Paris and eventually opened a studio in New York City. In later years she moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where she became a student of psychologist Carl Jung and edited some of his papers.
Mary Foote (1872-1968)
Oil on canvas, 1927
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the National American Woman Suffrage Association through Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, 1939