To be fair to the book, it's definitely not presented as Now The Fight Is Over, just that the particular militant suffragette movement of which Mattie was a part lost its momentum during the war as everybody threw themselves into war work instead, and now there's much less of a clear-cut path for her to follow in directing her efforts. One of the things I really liked, actually, was the presentation of the initial Women's Suffrage Act of 1918 as not the victory that Mattie and her friends dreamed of, but a half-measure that frustrates them more than otherwise -- and now in the present-timeline it's 1928 and all women are getting the vote and it still feels like a defeat, because it's so much later than it could and should have been.