Carrie Chapman Catt (1849-1947)

Portrait of Carrie Chapman Catt, two-time president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Catt was born in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1859 and graduated from Iowa State Agricultural College (presently Iowa State University). Before becoming an activist Catt was a teacher and later a superindentent at Mason City Iowa. Catt's suffrage career encompased all levels of organizations. In the late 1880s Catt became involved in the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association. Her early years in the NAWSA, Catt worked on a local level organizing their local chapters and speaking nationwide. Her activism was taken to another notch in 1900 when she became president of the NAWSA. Two years later Catt realized that the suffrage issue went beyond America's boarders and created the International woman Suffrage Alliance.

During the 1910s to 1920 wave of suffrage Catt issued the "Winning Plan", which was a strategy to make women's suffrage an amendment to the United States Constitution. Catt was also a supporter of World War I and did not approve of picketing the White House during the war.

Catt continued to be a social activist after the 19th amendment's passage. She published Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement, worked with World War I veterans, and later aided the German Jewish refugees.

For more on Carrie Chapman Catt go to: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/carrie-cha...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/wilson-carrie-chapm...

https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-american-woman-suffrage-associa...

https://cattcenter.iastate.edu/home/about-us/carrie-chapman-catt/

Public Domain

Link

[Carrie Chapman Catt, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing front]. 1914. Photographic print. Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/97500090/ (Accessed December 31, 2018).