Carrie Chapman Catt

Suffrage Leader

• Born: January 9, 1859
• Birthplace: Ripon, Wisconsin
• Died: March 9, 1947
• Place of death: New Rochelle, New York

American social reformer and feminist

Recognized as one of the ablest leaders and organizers of the woman suffrage movement, Catt brought new life to a faltering National American Woman Suffrage Association and designed the campaign that won the federal vote for women in 1920.

Areas of achievement Women’s rights, social reform, government and politics, peace advocacy

Early Life

Carrie Chapman Catt, the second of three children, was born Carrie Lane in Ripon, Wisconsin. Her parents, Maria Clinton and Lucius Lane, originally from the state of New York, had come west to live as farmers. In 1866, lured farther west by the Gold Rush, the family moved to Charles City, Iowa, where they remained throughout Catt’s adolescence.

Maria Clinton Lane had attended a women’s school, Oread Collegiate Institute, in Massachusetts. She encouraged her daughter to continue her studies beyond high school. Catt entered Iowa State Agricultural College in March, 1877, and graduated in November, 1880, the only woman in her graduating class. During her college career, she supported herself by teaching, washing dishes, and working in the school library. After college, Catt worked first as a law clerk and then as a schoolteacher in Mason City, Iowa. In 1883, she was appointed superintendent of schools, a post that she resigned in 1885 to marry Leo Chapman, editor of the Mason City Republican.

Like Catt, Leo Chapman was highly interested in political reform and used his position at the paper to push for social change. When a local Republican candidate sued him for libel, Chapman went to California to look for new employment opportunities. In 1886, Catt was notified that Chapman was ill with typhoid fever. She left Iowa to go to him, but while she was en route to California, she was notified that he had died.

Catt decided to settle in San Francisco, where she earned a barely adequate living through freelance journalism. The following year, she encountered George Catt, a fellow student at Iowa State. He encouraged her to become a public lecturer. She returned home to Charles City in 1887, working as a professional lecturer and the temporary editor of the Floyd County Advocate.

Life’s Work

On returning to Iowa, Catt joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the antialcohol, prosuffrage organization run by Frances Willard. The issue of woman suffrage increasingly interested Catt; in 1889, she was elected secretary of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890, she spoke at the convention of the newly merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), held in Washington, D.C. In June of that year, she moved to Seattle, Washington, to marry George Catt.

A few months later, Carrie Chapman Catt went to South Dakota to work for a state referendum for woman suffrage, traveling throughout the eastern part of the state to speak. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, she gained valuable experience and began to be touted as a leading figure in the suffrage movement.

In 1892, Catt again attended the NAWSA convention in Washington, D.C., where Susan B. Anthony asked her to speak before Congress on the proposed suffrage amendment. After she and her husband moved to Bensonhurst, New York, Catt became more active and worked more closely with Anthony and other leaders of the suffrage movement. At the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Catt was approached about campaigning in support of a state suffrage amendment in Colorado. Initially reluctant, she agreed and was instrumental in making Colorado the second state to allow women to vote, on November 7, 1893.

Throughout the next decade, Catt used her superlative organizational skills to establish political equality clubs, make speeches, and raise money for the suffrage movement. She headed the organizational committee within the NAWSA, which worked to coordinate suffrage campaigns throughout the United States and to educate women about suffrage.

When Anthony stepped down as president of the NAWSA in 1900, she chose Catt as her successor, citing her ingenuity and political sagacity. Catt served as president of the NAWSA for the next four years. During her tenure, she worked to raise money, increase enrollment, and establish links between the NAWSA and the International Council of Women, as well as the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. In 1904, she resigned her NAWSA presidency to care for her ailing husband. She became vice president at large under the organization’s new president, Anna Howard Shaw.

On October 8, 1905, George Catt died of a perforated duodenal ulcer. The death of Anthony in February, 1906, further shattered the grief-stricken Catt. Concerned for her health, Catt’s friends and doctor urged her to travel, and she spent much of her time for the following nine years abroad, working with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance to promote woman suffrage around the globe.

Catt’s international efforts helped make her even more well known at home, and she became recognized as a world leader in the suffrage movement. In 1914, she turned her attention to New York State, believing that if it passed a suffrage amendment, other states would soon follow suit. She toured the state, making numerous speeches and appearances. That same year, Mrs. Leslie, a publisher’s widow, died and left an estate worth more than $900,000 to Catt to use as she saw fit to promote woman suffrage. Because of legal difficulties arising from suits filed by Leslie’s relatives, who hotly contested the will, Catt did not receive the legacy until 1917, when she used it to set up the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission.

In 1915, Shaw announced her resignation as president of the NAWSA. The organization’s members turned to Catt, asking her to resume the presidency. She resisted their request until she was promised a free hand in governing the organization. Then she accepted the presidency and proceeded to make the NAWSA the most powerful woman’s organization in the history of the United States.

Following Anthony’s example, Catt refused to allow the NAWSA to work on any cause other than suffrage, realizing that a single goal would unify the organization and allow it to use its energy and resources more effectively. Her “Winning Plan,” put before the NAWSA in 1916, was to push for congressional passage of the suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution, rather than work on the slow process of getting the vote state by state. She proposed a campaign that would encompass every state, saying that each organization must run “a red-hot, never-ceasing campaign.”

Catt’s plan was hindered by divisions within the suffrage movement. Some of the movement’s more radical members broke off to form the Congressional Union (later known as the National Woman’s Party), headed by Alice Paul. Catt believed that the radical tactics adopted by such groups alienated the public and harmed the suffrage cause far more than they helped it. Another impediment to her goal was the inevitable involvement of the United States in World War I. Some suffragists, including Catt, were open advocates of peace, an unpopular premise in a country gearing itself for military action. Nevertheless, when diplomatic relations were broken with Germany in 1917, Catt and the NAWSA drafted a letter saying they would stand by the government in case of war. This act drew more criticism of Catt than anything else she had ever done. Despite her personal inclinations as a pacifist, Catt believed that getting women the vote must take precedence, and she would not let the peace activists stand in its way.

In designing her strategy, Catt took the Republican and Democratic parties as her model, knowing that the NAWSA could challenge these institutions only if it worked along the same principles. She wanted to establish a well-organized network that could affect public opinion in every state. Under her guidance, the NAWSA worked tirelessly to set up such a network and to educate the public about the importance of woman suffrage, distributing pamphlets, buttons, flyers, leaflets, posters, and even playing cards. The NAWSA purchased the popular suffrage newspaper Woman’s Journal, renamed it Woman Citizen, and used it to spread even more information.

On January 10, 1918, the House of Representatives passed the suffrage amendment. Jubilant suffragists sang on their way out of the Capitol, and the Congressional Union threw down their picket signs. The Senate delayed its vote on the suffrage amendment for ten months, eventually voting it down on October 1. Catt and her supporters refused to give up hope, insisting that votes for women were just around the corner. Rallying her organization, Catt plunged into another year of intensive campaigning.

In 1919, both the House and the Senate passed the Nineteenth Amendment, paving the way for state ratification. Catt sent telegrams to the state governors, urging them to call immediate special sessions for ratification of the amendment. She also notified the women’s organizations in each state to prepare themselves for the last desperate push. That fall, she went west on her “Wake up America” tour to drum up support for the amendment. On August 20, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the proclamation declaring the Nineteenth Amendment officially part of the United States Constitution.

After the ratification of the suffrage amendment, Catt stepped down from the presidency of the NAWSA, and was succeeded by Maud Wood Park. She continued to work with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and founded the new League of Women Voters. Her main focus, however, was world peace; she stated “war is to me my greatest woe.” Catt spoke across the country on behalf of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, insisting that the United States must accept internationalism. In 1925, she founded the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, whose purpose was to educate the public on peace issues and to pressure the U.S. government to work toward world peace. She was an influential political figure who worked for Prohibition and endorsed Herbert Hoover for the presidency in 1928, approving of his strong Prohibitionist views.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930’s, Catt worked to help Jewish victims of Nazism and was instrumental in the formation of the Protest Committee of Non-Jewish Women Against the Persecution of Jews in Germany in 1933. She helped organize the Women’s Centennial Congress in 1940, and during World War II, she served as the honorary chair of the Women’s Action Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace. Her last public appearance was in 1941, when she was presented with the Chi Omega Achievement Award, at a formal dinner at the White House. She retired to New Rochelle, New York, where she died on March 9, 1947, of heart failure following a gallstone operation.

Significance

A pragmatic, shrewd politician, Catt designed and implemented the plan of action that brought about the passage of the suffrage amendment at a time when its passage seemed doubtful. She worked tirelessly for the suffrage cause, giving literally thousands of speeches across the country and around the world. In her speeches, she stressed woman suffrage before suffrage for immigrants and American Indians, views that alienated some of her adherents. She would not have called herself a racist, however, since she saw herself as simply assessing realities. Her focus was always on voting rights for women; all other matters took second place.

Unlike some other suffragists, Catt did not believe the suffrage she worked so hard to establish would automatically change women’s status, nor was she surprised that American politics were not transformed by the events of 1920. She believed that women’s achievement of economic power, through their entrance into the workplace, would prove to be the key to improving women’s lives, and she stressed the importance of women supporting other women in the workplace.

Further Reading

Baker, Jean H., ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This revisionist look at the woman suffrage movement includes an essay on Catt and the last years of the long struggle for suffrage.

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, ed. Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800-1925: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. This collection includes an article on Catt by David S. Birdsell focusing on her use of rhetoric and her persuasive powers as a speaker. Contains a chronology of Catt’s speeches.

Catt, Carrie Chapman, and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement. 1923. Reprint. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. Catt’s book gives her own account of the events leading up to the passage of the suffrage amendment, and provides insight into her brilliant and reasoned political strategies.

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Free Press, 1989. While not focusing specifically on Catt, Evans provides a thoughtful overview of the woman suffrage movement in the United States and the events leading up to women’s achievement of the right to vote.

Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Faderman presents profiles of early civil rights activists, including Catt, who were woman-identified and were likely lesbians.

Fowler, Robert Booth. Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986. Primarily interested in Catt’s ability and vision as a leader, Fowler focuses for the most part on her political career, although he does provide a brief account of her early life.

Peck, Mary Gray. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography. 1944. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Written by one of Catt’s friends, who also worked in the suffrage movement, this first biography is the most detailed of the various accounts of Catt’s life. Nevertheless, in her attempts to write an impersonal account of which Catt would approve, Peck ignores most of Catt’s private life.

Van Voris, Jacqueline. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1987. A straightforward account of Catt’s life, focusing on her suffrage activism.