The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago on February 14, 1920, to help millions of newly enfranchised women exercise the vote and engage in public policy.
On February 14, 1920, the League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago, Illinois, at the final convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), just six months before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women's suffrage nationwide. Suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt proposed the creation of the League as a successor organization that would carry the momentum of the decades-long suffrage movement into a new phase: educating and empowering the millions of women about to gain the vote for the first time.
Unlike NAWSA, which had focused singularly on winning suffrage, the League of Women Voters was conceived as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to voter education, civic engagement, and advocacy on public policy issues affecting women and families. Its founding represented a critical pivot point in American women's history — a recognition that winning the vote was only the first step, and that sustained organizing would be necessary to ensure women could meaningfully participate in democracy.
The League's establishment is historically significant as one of the largest and most enduring civic legacies of the suffrage movement. It provided a structural bridge between the nineteenth-century fight for the ballot and twentieth-century movements for women's fuller political and civic participation. Over a century later, the League remains active, having expanded its mission to encompass voter registration, candidate forums, and advocacy on issues ranging from redistricting to healthcare, continuing the work begun by the suffragists who founded it.