“T hese are sad times for the whole world, grown unexpectedly sadder by the sudden and sweeping epidemic of Influenza,” wrote women’s suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt in October 1918 as she lay ill with the Spanish Flu. “This new affliction is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle in our referendum campaigns and in the Congressional and Senatorial campaigns.”

As President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Catt was concerned about the risks the pandemic might cause to women’s seventy year struggle to win the right to vote—since the first major public convention in Seneca Falls, New York devoted entirely to women’s rights. Following in the footsteps of suffrage pioneers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Lucy stone, along with countless other leaders, Catt and Alice Paul—of the National Woman’s Party—were leading the final push to secure women’s access to the ballot box.

What they didn’t foresee was that the pandemic and World War I would bolster women’s cause. Men were dying in larger numbers than women, mainly due to the war, which created labor shortages. This enabled women to take on new roles and forever redefine their place in society. Families needed income, so women worked in munitions factories and the textile industry, and were employed as postal workers, police, firefighters, bank clerks, bus and tram conductors, railway guards and ticket collectors, and heavy machinists. Women also demonstrated their value to society by volunteering to help with the war effort by rolling bandages, preparing meals, packing and shipping supplies, and organizing fund-raisers. Catt later said, “The increasing number of women wage-earners, many supporting families and some supporting husbands, has thrown out the ‘women are represented’ [by men] argument.”

Women leveraged their good will and social contributions to win their right to vote via the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Decades before, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote of voting, “The right is ours; have it we must; use it we will.”

Let’s all vote! It matters.