West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association

He also reported that the eight senators had voted to invite Anna E. Dickinson to lecture at the state-house while she was there in the state presenting at Wheeling, West Virginia.

West Virginia was a target state, and by 1895, NAWSA funded a visit by Annie L. Diggs of Kansas in the spring who reported "the question was too new to make any organization possible.

Carrie Chapman Catt, chair of the NAWSA organizing committee and close friend of Mary Garrett Hay, took a personal interest in supporting the process and presented at the convention as well.

[8] Annual conventions thereafter followed: In the fall of 1919, WVESA president Ruhl appointed Lenna Lowe Yost to chair a Ratification Committee that organized a statewide petition drive and gathered together an Advisory Board of 150 men and women from various parts of the state to support their lobbying efforts.

Yost led the strategy that positioned individual activists with each legislator as they came to the special session called by Governor John J. Cornwell in February 1920.

This personal attention and insistence to bolster one-on-one interactions overcame the stiff opposition and the legislature sent its ratification of the federal amendment to the Governor for signature on March 10, 1920.