In 1910, Grace Wilbur Trout was elected president of the Chicago Political Equity League (CPEL) and immediately took steps to make woman suffrage a popular issue. She organized parade floats and automobile tours throughout northern Illinois.

An acclaimed orator, she traveled across the country speaking on behalf of suffrage. Two years later, she was elected president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association and began to lobby legislators in Springfield to expand woman suffrage in Illinois. To avoid an arduous battle to amend the state constitution (a strategy that had ended in failure every previous year), Trout proposed a simple legislative act that would grant suffrage to women for all offices except those specifically mentioned in the state constitution. The strategy worked, and the Presidential and Municipal Suffrage Act enfranchised 1.6 million women in 1913.

Over the next seven years, Trout worked to defend the constitutionality of the act, to build a coalition that would result in a new state constitution that would guarantee equal suffrage, and to help ensure passage of a federal amendment granting women suffrage. When the 19th Amendment passed Congress, Trout already had a plan to make Illinois the first state to ratify the new amendment, which the legislature did on June 10, 1919.