Catt, the pioneering suffragist who had led the final push for the 19th Amendment and founded the League of Women Voters, came to Sweet Briar College with a message not from herself but from the dead. She was 77 years old, and she had spent half a century in the women's rights movement — she had personally organized campaigns in dozens of states, lobbied nineteen successive Congresses, and coordinated the work of millions of volunteers. Her opening reframed the entire commencement: these young women were not just graduating, they were inheriting. The 'will' had been written in struggle. Catt proceeded to lay out what she called 'The Woman's Century' — the hundred years from 1820 to 1920 — in which women had gone from being unable to study geography (considered 'quite inappropriate for young females') to earning college degrees, from having no legal right to their own wages or children to winning the vote in twenty countries.