The
Story of a Blue Dress
“At
last the preposterous dream of seventy years began to be realized,” wrote Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein
DeHerrera in Reflecting Freedom: How Fashion Mirrored the Struggle for
Women’s Rights.
In January 1918, Jeanette Rankin from Montana (the first and only woman in Congress) introduced
the suffrage-granting Anthony Amendment (named after Susan B. Anthony who had
first introduced it in 1878) in the House of Representatives where it passed the needed two-thirds majority by a single vote.
Thrilled at the 19th amendment passing in the House, National American Women’s Suffrage Association president Carrie Chapman Catt “was certain that congressional victory, after 40 exasperating years, was near,” Elaine Weiss explained in The Woman's Hour. Carrie’s enthusiasm overpowered her usual patient pragmatism, as well as the current wartime austerity, and she ordered a new silk dress—her “ratification dress”—to wear as she campaigned through the states, fashioning it in her favorite color—sapphire blue.
However, “the ratification dress hung in Carrie’s closet for a full year-and-a-half as
the Senate dithered and filibustered and twice more voted down the
amendment.” When
she received the phone call in early June of 1919 that the amendment finally squeaked
through, Carrie first “broke into a wild dance, stomping all over her house,
whooping and singing,” then she calmly went to work, putting her ratification
plans into motion.
“It
was finally time to put on the blue dress, but before she could, it needed to
be remodeled and shortened by a seamstress, as fashion styles had changed so
rapidly in the meantime,” continued Weiss. “Though the dress had hung in her closet for an infuriating
18 months, Carrie Catt eventually put it to good use”—in
its more stylish silhouette—“as she blazed through the states, chasing the thirty-six
required legislative ratifications.” And, after more than a year
traveling over the country, she wore it once more in the last state to vote—hot, stifling
Tennessee in August of 1920 (and probably wearing it with one of those new-fangled
girdles!)
But Carrie was to wear the dress again on August 27—the day
after the amendment was signed into law—during the glorious celebratory parade in
New York City honoring women’s newly-won suffrage. She stood in the back of an open car to salute the cheering crowd, tall and proud,
her hat tilted to one side, the other arm holding the gigantic bouquet of blue
delphiniums (her favorite flower) and suffrage-yellow chrysanthemums, where
“she seemed at once the victorious general and the beloved queen,” Weiss described.
The
next day, when Carrie finally returned home to Juniper Ledge in New York, she sat at her desk and,
looking out at her garden, wrote “a poignant charge to the women voters of the
nation”:
The
vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your
liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of
thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can
comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That
vote has been costly. Prize it!
The
vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it
intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make
no pause. Act! ~
[Sources:
Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein DeHerrera from Reflecting Freedom: How Fashion Mirrored the Struggle for Women’s
Rights and Elaine Weiss from The
Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.]