http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=129242853...

Catt, Carrie Chapman. "Votes for All: A Symposium." The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. Vol 15 No. 1. November, 1917. pp 19-21

Surprisingly, I found it difficult to locate an article where discussions of the war and of women's issues explicitly intersect. Hence, the lateness of this post. Much more common, especially in looking through issues of The Crisis, are writers linking the struggle for gender equality with the struggle for racial equality. The argument frequently advanced is that women's rights activists worked tirelessly during the Reconstruction era in support of racial equality, culminating in the Fifteenth Amendment, but that black men failed to repay the favor by supporting women's right to vote. Catt clings to this idea as well, although her angry accusation that all men, regardless of race, are "wonderfully alike when it comes to counting women out in any scheme for the political salvation of the world" seems more than a touch unfair when one considers the persistent arguments made by men in favor of female suffrage in many earlier issues of The Crisis. The publication's editors clearly agreed that the racial and gender problems were bound inextricably together. Catt goes further, however, by associating both issues with the contemporaneous Great War. Each of these, she argues, is a battle for democracy, for the "faith that is sustaining alike the men of the Allied Armies on the battlefields of Europe, the women of the world waging their own double struggle to meet the new economic demands upon them while trying to secure a voice in their own government, and the Negro facing the selfsame problem and often refusing to see that through the Negro women his race is as vitally involved in the woman suffrage question as race can be." This couching of the suffrage question in terms of conflict and struggle is not at all unusual in the texts that we've looked at. The analogy with the Great War thus seems clear, and for Catt the object of the campaigns for racial/gender equality, like the object of the European war, is nothing less than "the political salvation of the world."

The alternative, she suggests, is dehumanization itself: "We could, of course, forswear democracy and herd together under an autocracy that would whip us into a grand machine, efficient as Germany's." This  is the pervasive fear of modernism: the automated coldness of modern warfare and technology, the mechanization of the human spirit. But invoked in this way it seem to complicate Catt's argument. After all, isn't that exactly what "total war" does, converting the population into parts of a mechanized whole? "Everybody counts in applying democracy," she says, just as wartime propaganda hammered home the message that everybody counts in winning a war. I would argue that Catt's analogy betrays a still-naive understanding of this war as a heroic quest for Justice, like the domestic civil rights issues which she's concerned with. She does not suggest a view of the war as itself mechanizing, itself dehumanizing, but rather as a tool of liberation, like women's suffrage. What I interpret from this is that our current understanding of this war as a uniquely traumatic and horrific event developed gradually. This is probably attributable in large part to the fact that Catt was American rather than European, and so had briefer experience of her nation's involvement with the conflict.