Carrie Chapman Catt

Carrie Lane was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, and raised on a farm outside Charles City, Iowa, after her family moved west when she was seven. In 1880 she graduated from Iowa Agricultural College the only woman in her class, then worked as a schoolteacher and, within three years, was running the Mason City school district as one of the first women in the state to hold the job. She married the newspaper editor Leo Chapman in 1885 — he died of typhoid fever in San Francisco the next year — and the widowed Chapman supported herself briefly as a journalist before returning to Iowa to organize for suffrage full time. Her second marriage, to the engineer George Catt in 1890, came with a written understanding: four months of every year belonged to him, the rest to the cause.

Catt took over the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900, resigned in 1904 to nurse her dying husband, and returned in 1915 with what she called the Winning Plan — state campaigns and a federal amendment pursued at once, run from a headquarters staffed by paid organizers instead of volunteers. She had founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1902 and led it into the 1920s, carrying the strategy abroad. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 26, 1920, enfranchising an estimated 27 million women, the largest single expansion of the American electorate. Nine days before ratification she founded the League of Women Voters to train the new electorate, and afterward turned the same machinery toward peace, founding the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War in 1925.

Catt's winning strategy carried a documented cost. To hold Southern support for the federal amendment, she let NAWSA distance itself from Black civil rights causes during her second presidency, and said in her own words that white supremacy would be strengthened, not weakened, by suffrage. The organization did little to stop Southern states from using literacy tests and poll taxes to keep the amendment from meaning much for Black women, and prominent Black suffragists including Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were kept at arm's length from the final campaign, even as Catt personally corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois and contributed to The Crisis. Historians still argue over how much of this was conviction and how much calculated expediency — the amendment she delivered in 1920 did not reach Black women in the Jim Crow South for decades more.

Catt spent her last two decades on internationalist causes, founding the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War and speaking out against the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. She died on March 9, 1947, at her home in New Rochelle, New York, and asked to be buried beside Mary Garrett Hay, her companion of more than twenty years, rather than either of her two husbands. Her name still divides opinion: Iowa State renamed its renovated agriculture building Catt Hall for her in 1995, students spent decades protesting the choice over her record on race, and in 2023 a university review committee recommended keeping the name anyway.

Carrie Chapman Catt's life against the full span of the corpus.

• International Woman Suffrage Alliance company
  Carried the American suffrage strategy to other countries 1902
• NAWSA Winning Plan mission
  Coordinated state campaigns and the federal amendment simultaneously 1916
• Nineteenth Amendment ratification campaign mission
  The final push she ran as NAWSA president 1920
• League of Women Voters company
  Founded to train the newly enfranchised electorate 1920

• January 9, 1859 aged 0 Born in Ripon, Wisconsin
• 1880 aged ~21 Graduates Iowa Agricultural College, the only woman in her class
• 1885 aged ~26 Marries Leo Chapman, who dies of typhoid the next year
• June 10, 1890 aged 31 Marries engineer George Catt
• 1900 aged ~41 Elected president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association
• 1902 aged ~43 Founds the International Woman Suffrage Alliance
• 1915 aged ~56 Returns to the NAWSA presidency and launches the Winning Plan
• August 26, 1920 aged 61 The Nineteenth Amendment is ratified
• March 9, 1947 aged 88 Dies in New Rochelle, New York

• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. mentored by
• Alice Paul 1885–1977
  Strategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. rival
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. succeeded the movement of
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. clashed with