Women You May Not Know

Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was both the only woman and valedictorian of her Iowa State College graduating class.

Widowed early, Catt remarried in 1890, but again outlived her engineer husband George Catt. His wealth helped subsidize her suffrage efforts, especially in the dominant National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and by 1900, Catt was named Susan B. Anthony’s successor.

Catt’s strategy was controversial; she sought gradual state-by-state suffrage over an immediate federal mandate, played to Southern prejudices against immigrants, Natives, and other non-whites, and supported U.S. involvement in the First World War.

Judged conciliatory by some and pandering by others, Catt nevertheless mobilized an estimated 1 million volunteers in dozens of campaigns to secure adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Thereafter, Catt founded the League of Women Voters and the International Alliance for Women, made a bid for the U.S. presidency on the Commonwealth Land Party ticket (1920), and embraced pacifism.

Catt’s vehement defense of German Jews preceding World War II made her the first woman awarded the American Hebrew Medal.

By Jen Hawkins