Catt, Carrie Chapman 1859-1947

American Decades | Date: 2001

CATT, CARRIE CHAPMAN 1859-1947

Suffragist

Early Years

Carrie Chapman Catt, a leader during the 1910s of the movement for a women's suffrage amendment to the Constitution, was born on a family farm in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1859. In 1866 her family settled in Charles City, Iowa, where Carrie attended a one-room schoolhouse until entering high school. In March 1877 she entered the Iowa State Agricultural College, where she paid her tuition with the money she had earned while teaching at a country schoolhouse. She graduated in 1880, the only woman in her class of eighteen students, and began reading for the law. But she abandoned her legal education to accept a teaching job in Mason City, Iowa, and in her second year at the school she became its superintendent. In 1885 she married Leo Chapman, a suffragist and editor of the local weekly, Republican, and she began writing about women's issues for the paper. She also began attending women's suffrage meetings, traveling that year to Des Moines, Iowa, for a conference of the American Association of Women, chaired by suffragist Julia Ward Howe. In May 1886 Chapman arrived in San Francisco to find that her husband had died of typhoid fever while awaiting her arrival. She remained in the city for a year before returning to her family in Charles City.

Lecturer and Activist

While in the West Chapman began lecturing as a means of supporting herself. Many of her lectures focused on the dangers that immigrants posed to American society. She particularly disapproved of the fact that male immigrants were given the vote within six months of arriving in America, while women born and raised in the United States were denied the same right. She took a firm stance against Native Americans for the same reason—that Native American men could vote. In the 1900s and 1910s she recanted these positions and became a staunch supporter of racial and ethnic equality.

NAWSA

In 1890 the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) formed from two suffragist factions that had been divided for twenty years. Chapman, present at the first meeting, became within ten years president of the organization. Meanwhile, in June 1890, after formalizing a prenuptial agreement that allowed her to remain active in the suffrage movement, she married George Catt, who was a strong supporter of his wife's work until his death in 1905. Between 1890 and 1910 Carrie Chapman Catt was a leader of NAWSA and specialized in organization and coordination of the group's field work. She was president of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904, when she resigned to care for her dying husband.

National Figure

In October 1909 Catt and other activists launched the Woman Suffrage Party. She had mainly devoted the 1900s to two endeavors—campaigning for women's suffrage in New York State and helping organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. This alliance had formed in 1902 in Washington, D.C., and later held conferences in Berlin (1904), Copenhagen (1906), Amsterdam (1908), and London (1909). Though Catt remained an international figure, she devoted most of her energy in the 1910s to the cause of women's suffrage in the United States. After a world tour from 1911 to 1912, she returned to America in November 1912, arriving in San Francisco just as women in that city were voting for the first time in a national election. (California and nine other states had passed suffrage laws by 1912).

Success

In 1915 Catt again became president of NAWSA, at a time when the organization was deeply divided by Alice Paul's more radical Congressional Union (renamed the Woman's Party in 1916), which challenged NAWSA's methods. Catt's organizational skills helped bridge the gap between the group's two factions by combining NAWSA's emphasis on state suffrage rights with Paul's insistence on a federal amendment. Catt's program, named the "Winning Plan," won approval, and within two years of its adoption by NAWSA, President Woodrow Wilson, after years of reluctance, requested a suffrage bill from Congress. The bill passed the House on 10 January 1918 and the Senate on 4 June 1919. On 26 August 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified; it mandated that women could vote in every state and in every election.

War Years

In 1915, as the United States prepared for a possible entry into World War I, Catt helped found the Woman's Peace Party. This party called for opposition to militarism, a general disarmament, an international police force, and women's suffrage as a means of "feminizing" governments, a process which she believed would reduce the possibility of wars. Eventually, in a reversal, she threw the support of NAWSA behind the U.S. government's "preparedness" position—an act for which she was vilified by other pacifists; but her support of President Wilson later proved invaluable in the drive toward women's suffrage. Catt had offered NAWSA's support for the war effort despite the fact that she continued to believe, as she said, that "war is…barbarism, a relic of the stone age." While continuing her critically important work in the suffrage movement, she served on the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense.

Final Years

Carrie Chapman Catt's work did not end with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. At NAWSA's convention in 1919 she organized the National League of Women Voters, which became the logical successor to NAWSA. After the suffrage amendment passed, some twenty-seven million women were suddenly eligible to vote, but many of them were unfamiliar with the world of politics. Thus, the league's first function was to educate these new voters. Catt also continued her international peace work, calling on the women of the world to end the barbarism of war. In 1925, in Washington, D.C., she participated in the first "Conference on the Cause and Cure of War," which met annually until 1939, and for which she served as conference chairperson until 1937. In her later years she received numerous honorary degrees, and was given a citation of honor by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. In 1933 she won the American Hebrew Medal for her efforts on behalf of German-Jewish refugees. In 1947 Catt died of a heart attack in New Rochelle, New York, at the age of eighty-eight.

Source:

Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987).

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.