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| Carrie Chapman Catt |
“I believe that a crisis has come,” said suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, as she spoke in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 7, 1916, “which, if recognized and the opportunity seized with vigor, enthusiasm and will, means the final victory of our great cause in the very near future.”
“Victory.” “Great cause.” Chapman Catt gave a militaristic speech in wartime, and her militaristic metaphors carried forth her call for women’s rights, democracy, and economic wisdom. She did not just give a political call, however; no, it was a symbolic battle.
How do metaphors work in speeches? A metaphor directly equates two things, for example, “life is a rose.” Unlike similes (“life is like a rose”), metaphors change how we think. When we talk about a table’s legs, we literally forget that a table isn’t a person, doesn’t really have legs, and does not actually stand on legs, or anything else, for that matter. Instead, the metaphor shapes how we think about tables. So, with women’s rights, there wasn’t literally a crisis, not in the sense that Europe was in a crisis, and no bombs were bursting around the suffragists’ demonstrations. Instead, Chapman Catt’s metaphors created symbolic power. And, in the long run, what kind of power is greater?
Indeed, Chapman Catt insisted in warlike manner, “our victory hangs within our grasp.” She talked about a “long drawn out struggle” and “cruel hostility.” Chapman Catt began by reviewing women’s practical wartime contributions, and ended with a symbolic but militaristic call for women’s struggles. Chapman Catt’s military metaphors – “crisis,” “struggle,” “cruel hostility,” stressed the fight for women’s rights.
So, in 1916, World War I was ravaging Europe, while the United States remained at peace. With the world thinking of war – they called it the Great War, for they never imagined that an even worse war was coming – Chapman Catt’s metaphors drew women’s rights from the global conflict.
So, while casting her eyes on the war’s social and economic effects, Chapman Catt recognized that the war would overturn the social order and create a new world.
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| Woman working in British airplane factory, 1914 |
Citing unnamed authorities, she agreed that the war would “lead to social and political revolution throughout the entire world.” She predicted “that the war presages a total change in the status of women.”
To emphasize her point, Chapman Catt reminded her audience of the war’s economic cost in money and human lives. With the men at war, women began to fill traditional men’s roles. In sad contrast, as Chapman Catt pointed out, men who could have contributed economically were, instead, destroyed on the battlefield. Many of the survivors would, she continued. “go to their homes, blind, crippled and incapacitated to do the work they once performed.” In the meantime, she noted that the war forced women into the workplace, growing crops and building bombs, while also giving “tender and skilled care to the wounded.”
With the war bringing women’s economic contributions forward, what choice would the world have, Chapman Catt asked, then to recognize their work?
“The economic axiom, denied and evaded for centuries, will be blazoned on every factory, counting house and shop: ‘Equal pay for equal work’; and common justice will slowly, but surely enforce that law.”And thus, as the war ripped the traditional economic system to bits, Chapman Catt stated that the violence of warfare would soon release women from their symbolic (and sometimes more literal) enslavement:
“So it happens that above the roar of cannon, the scream of shrapnel and the whirr of aeroplanes, one who listens may hear the cracking of the fetters which have long bound the European woman to outworn conventions.”Not just freedom, she said, but “cracking of the fetters.” Building on that symbolic but potent connection, Chapman Catt ended by calling, not only for “emancipation,” but for a “bugle call” to lead women as they march toward freedom. The military metaphor had, in her speech, now become a real battle, emerging from the war’s horrors, and bringing liberty to women who fought for their freedom:
“The Political emancipation of our sex calls you: Women of America, arise! Are you content that others shall pay the price of your liberty? Women in schools and counting houses, in shops and on the farm, women in the home with babes at their breasts and women engaged in public careers will hear. The veins of American women are not filled with milk and water. They are neither cowards nor slackers. They will come. They only await the bugle call to learn that the final battle is on.”Like the fighting men in Europe, American women were, she said, “neither cowards nor slackers.” Instead, they prepared for “the final battle” to begin. Thus, her prescient discussion of the war’s political and economic effects had now culminated in full-grown military metaphors.
From disaster, Chapman Catt had drawn hope. She expected “that the war will be followed by a mighty, oncoming wave of democracy.” Her reason was that “the conflict has been one of governments, of kings and Czars, Kaisers and Emperors; not of peoples.”
Overall, Chapman Catt and her metaphors tied her themes together brilliantly. Yes, the Great War had brought women into economic roles that men had previously served. The men answered the call to fight. The women answered their call to serve. The war disrupted the economic institutions that the traditionalists mistakenly thought they were preserving. As the war ended, the fight for women’s rights would just begin. The Great War was a war of slaughter. The metaphorical war of American women was a fight of freedom. Symbols helped create the new reality.
Now, Chapman Catt led various women’s organizations, and we remember her today as the founder of the League of Women Voters. One of her predictions came true: the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed only a few years later, recognized women’s right to vote. In that sense, her optimistic belief that the war would lead to more democracy had some truth. Unfortunately, the war was also followed by a tariff war, the Great Depression, economic upheavals, and the rise of worldwide dictatorships. Another war, even more evil than the first, would soon ravage the world. Indeed, the second war was delayed only by the need to raise a new generation of soldiers to replace the ones who died the first time. And I, for one, saddened by the rise of Donald Trump and his movement of resentment and reaction, remain unconvinced that the nation ever learned the lessons that Carrie Chapman Catt so eloquently taught.
by William D. Harpine
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Research Note: Many outstanding scholars have written about metaphors, but, as I wrote, I was particularly thinking about I. A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric. And many thanks, once again, to AmericanRhetoric.com, co-founded by my graduate school classmate and book editor, the late Martin J. Medhurst, for publishing the text of this important speech.
Copyright © 2025 by William D. Harpine
Image of Carrie Chapman Catt: Joint Suffrage Procession Committee,
public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Image of woman working in factory, University of British Columbia,
public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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