Women struggled for more than seventy years to win the right to vote. After the Civil War, suffrage activists waged their campaigns at the state level, and Western states were the first to grant suffrage to women. The national movement received a decisive boost during World War I when women swelled the workforce, replacing the men who had been called to war. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1919, the House Judiciary Committee would observe that a woman's right to vote "is plainly in the signs of the times."