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In October 1918, Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of one of America’s national women’s suffrage movements, lay sick in bed in New York.

“She was stricken with influenza,” wrote Catt’s friend and biographer, Mary Gray Peck, referring to the Spanish flu pandemic that was rapidly tearing across the country and, by some accounts, killed close to 200,000 people in October alone.

“Chained to her bed like St. Lawrence to the gridiron. She looked and was extremely ill.”

Catt was, however, concerned with issues beyond — but not unrelated to — the pains of the flu, according to Peck.

The invisible, unpredictable force of the pandemic risked derailing her carefully planned campaign to secure women’s right to vote. The 19th Amendment was, at that moment, hanging by a thread in Congress. And the national suffrage movement, led in large part by two organizations — Catt’s National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman’s Party — had managed to drum up immense momentum only to see it quickly dissipate as the country shut down public gatherings and ordered people to stay home.