Carrie Chapman Catt

Carrie Chapman Catt 1859-1947, American suffragist and peace advocate, b. Carrie Lane, Ripon, Wis., grad. Iowa State College (now Iowa State Univ.), 1880. She was superintendent of schools (1883-84) in Mason City, Iowa. In 1885 she married Lee Chapman, a journalist (d. 1886), and in 1890, George Catt, an engineer (d. 1905). From 1890 to 1900 an organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she became its president in 1900. She led the campaign to win suffrage through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), she organized the League of Women Voters for the political education of women. At the Berlin convocation of the International Council of Women she helped organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, of which she was president from 1904 to 1923. After 1923 she devoted her efforts chiefly to the peace movement. With Nettie R. Shuler she wrote Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923).

Bibliography: See study by R. B. Fowler (1986).

Catt, Carrie Chapman (b. 9 Jan. 1859, d. 9 Mar. 1947). US suffragist Born at Ripon, Wisconsin, she was present at the founding of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. As its president 1900–4 and 1915–20, she saw the fulfilment of women's suffrage in the US with the passing of the Nineteenth Constitutional Amendment in 1920. In response, in that year she co-founded the League of Women Voters. Catt was also associated with the American pacifist movement and an isolationist. In 1915, she founded the Woman's Peace Party (together with Jane Addams), and chaired the Commission on the Cause and Cure of War between 1925 and 1932. In contrast to Addams, however, after the war she partly turned her attention away from the issue of international peace, putting her efforts into the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (later the International Alliance of Women), which she had co-founded in 1904 and which she continued to lead with energy until 1925. Opposition to Fascism and the Nazis caused her to abandon her pacifism in the 1930s.