The status of women had risen so high by 1917 that public opinion for the first time recognized a women's voice in public affairs. Two main themes were central. The suffrage movement was building rapidly, pushing eastward from its base in California and the western states. Carrie Chapman Catt, as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was a key leader, as the suffragists organized in hundreds of cities in every state. The second main theme was pacifism. Jane Addams, the Chicago social worker, was perhaps the foremost spokesperson for opposition to war, as head of the International Congress of Women for Permanent Peace. Pressures toward war proved irresistible. President Woodrow Wilson deliberately appealed to the pacifist vision by promising this would be a war to end all wars. The one woman in Congress, Representative Jeanette Rankin, Democrat of Montana...