Carrie Chapman Catt was elected leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900, succeeding Anthony, who was 80 that year.
- Catt had been born in 1859 and so was not part of the generation that had been radicalised over abolitionism and the Civil War.
- She represented a more right-wing attitude than that of Stanton and Anthony and was prepared to stir up resentment against ‘the votes possessed by the males in the slums of the cities, and the ignorant foreign vote’.
- Carrie Catt had begun her lecturing career with such titles as ‘America for Americans’, criticising the morals and manners of new immigrants.
This nativist sentiment was gaining ground at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the
20th centuries, with the influx of foreign immigrants.