While addressing the International Alliance of Women in Budapest, Addams learned Illinois had granted women the vote, a landmark east of the Mississippi.
On June 17, 1913, Jane Addams delivered her address "The Need of Woman's Vote" at the Seventh Congress of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Budapest, Hungary. During the proceedings, Addams and fellow American delegates received cablegrams announcing that the Illinois legislature had passed a bill granting women the right to vote in presidential and municipal elections.
This development made Illinois the first state east of the Mississippi River to extend suffrage to women, a major breakthrough for the American suffrage movement, which had previously succeeded mainly in western states. The news, arriving while Addams was on an international stage advocating for women's political rights, created a powerful symbolic convergence between her domestic and international suffrage advocacy.
Addams had long been an active suffragist, having served as a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she used her platform in Budapest to link women's enfranchisement to broader arguments about municipal reform, social welfare, and international peace. The Illinois victory, announced in the midst of her international address, energized suffrage campaigns in other states and demonstrated the growing momentum of the movement. It also underscored Addams's dual role as both a domestic reformer deeply embedded in Chicago politics and an internationally respected figure in global women's rights and peace movements.