[Suffragists demonstrating against Woodrow Wilson in Chicago, 1916]

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Wilson earned a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins University, served as a professor and scholar at various institutions, as President of Princeton University. In 1910 he was elected the 34th Governor of New Jersey, serving from 1911 to 1913. He became the first Southerner elected as president since Zachary Taylor in 1848. He became the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson elected to two consecutive terms. He oversaw the passage of progressive legislative policies unparalleled until the New Deal in 1933. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Wilson maintained a policy of neutrality and his second term was dominated by American entry into World War I. During the war, Wilson focused on diplomacy and financial considerations, leaving military strategy to the generals, especially General John J. Pershing. Loaning billions of dollars to Britain, France, and other Allies, the United States aided their finance of the war effort. Following years of advocacy for suffrage on the state level, in 1918 he endorsed the Nineteenth Amendment, whose ratification in 1920 provided an equal right to vote for women. Early in 1918, he issued his principles for peace, the Fourteen Points, and in 1919 he traveled to Paris, promoting the formation of a League of Nations, concluding the Treaty of Versailles. A devoted Presbyterian, Wilson infused morality into his internationalism, an ideology now referred to as "Wilsonian"—an activist foreign policy calling on the nation to promote global democracy. For his sponsorship of the League of Nations, Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, the second of three sitting presidents so honored. "Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world."

Chicago or: Chi-Town or Chitown, Chicagoland, The White City, City by the Lake, City of the Big Shoulders, City of Broad Shoulders, City of the Century, The 312, City on the Make, The City That Works, The Big Onion, City in a Garden, Hog-Butcher to the World, Beirut by the Lake, New York Done Right, Illville, I Will City, Paris on the Prairie, Sweet Home, Heart of America, The 773, The Alley Capital of America

Suffragettes Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the late 1800s, women worked for broad-based economic and political equality and for social reforms, and sought to change voting laws in order to allow them to vote. National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts to gain voting rights, especially the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904, Berlin, Germany), and also worked for equal civil rights for women. Women who owned property gained the right to vote in the Isle of Man in 1881, and in 1893, the British colony of New Zealand granted all women the right to vote. Most independent countries enacted women's suffrage in the interwar era, including Canada in 1917; Britain, Germany, Poland in 1918; Austria and the Netherlands in 1919; and the United States in 1920. Leslie Hume argues that the First World War changed the popular mood: "The women's contribution to the war effort challenged the notion of women's physical and mental inferiority and made it more difficult to maintain that women were, both by constitution and temperament, unfit to vote. If women could work in munitions factories, it seemed both ungrateful and illogical to deny them a place in the polling booth. But the vote was much more than simply a reward for war work; the point was that women's participation in the war helped to dispel the fears that surrounded women's entry into the public arena..."