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SCI LIBRARY

A Brief Introduction to the
Life and Ideals of Carrie Chapman Catt

Edward J. Dodson



[December, 2012]


The woman who would dedicate most of her life to the securing of equal right for women was born in Wisconsin during 1859. Carrie Clinton Lane graduated from Iowa State Unviersity in 1880. In 1885 she married a newespaper editor named Leo Chapman, who died not long after their marriage. Five years later she married George Catt, an engineer. That same year she delivered a speech on women's suffrage in which she mentioned the Single Tax proposal of Henry George and his supporters.

In 1900, an 80 year old Susan B. Anthony stepped down as president of the National Association of Women (NAWSA). Carrie Chapman Catt was elected to succeed her and remained at the head of NAWSA until 1904. In a speech delivered in 1902, she commented on the state of women in the United States:
"The world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility, and then called her weak. It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men and when, to gain it, she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain."

Carrie and other women in the United States were doing what they could to support suffragists in England, who were committed to large public demonstrations. At the international conference held in Amsterdam in 1908, Carrie urged further close collaboration and unified action:

In the long run it cannot matter where the victory comes earliest, since our cause is not national but international. … We must grow closer to each other; we must learn to help each other, to give courage to the fainthearted and cheer to the disappointed of all lands. Within our Alliance we must develop a spirit of internationalism, a spirit so clarified from all personalities and ambitions and even national antagonisms that its purity and grandeur will furnish new inspiration to all workers in our cause.

After a global tour that included Japan and China, Carrie arrived in San Francisco in November 1912. Women in California had won the right to vote in 1911 and were now voting for the first time.

The campaign for women's suffrage received a major boost in 1914. Miriam Florence Follin (the widow of Frank Leslie) died on the 18th of September and bequeathed nearly $2 million to Carrie Chapman Catt, personally, entrusting she would utilize the funds to advance the cause of women's suffrage. Heirs to Mrs. Leslie's fortunate contested the will. Faced with the costs of a court battle, she conveyed the following instruction to her attorney:
"I ask myself what right have I, to whom Mrs. Leslie entrusted the residue of her estate, to be used for a certain purpose, to begin by giving a large portion of it to people whom she distinctly and deliberately intended should not have it. The duty imposed upon me is not a pleasant one and is likely to be accompanied by no little trouble and expense. Yet my conscience tells me that a principle is at stake, and that since the trust has been given me I have no right not to act in accordance with my best judgment and conscience."

At the 1916 convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, offered this advice to her co-suffragettes:
"Do not stand in the way of the next step in human progress. No one living who reads the signs of the times but realizes that woman suffrage must come. We are working for the ballot as a matter of justice and as a step for human betterment."

In 1917 she made the case for women's suffrage before the U.S. House of Representatives:

"Woman suffrage is inevitable. Suffragists knew it before November 4, 1917; opponents afterward. Three distinct causes made it inevitable.

"First, the history of our country. Ours is a nation born of revolution, of rebellion against a system of government so securely entrenched in the customs and traditions of human society that in 1776 it seemed impregnable. From the beginning of things, nations had been ruled by kings and for kings, while the people served and paid the cost. The American Revolutionists boldly proclaimed the heresies: 'Taxation without representation is tyranny.' 'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed'. The colonists won, and the nation which was established as a result of their victory has held unfailingly that these two fundamental principles of democratic government are not only the spiritual source of our national existence but have been our chief historic pride and at all times the sheet anchor of our liberties.

"Eighty years after the Revolution, Abraham Lincoln welded those two maxims into a new one: 'Ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people'. Fifty years more passed and the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in a mighty crisis of the nation, proclaimed to the world: 'We are fighting for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts: for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government'.

"All the way between these immortal aphorisms political leaders have declared unabated faith in their truth. Not one American has arisen to question their logic in the 141 years of our national existence. However stupidly our country may have evaded the logical application at times, it has never swerved from its devotion to the theory of democracy as expressed by those two axioms ....

"With such a history behind it, how can our nation escape the logic it has never failed to follow, when its last unenfranchised class calls for the vote? Behold our Uncle Sam floating the banner with one hand, 'Taxation without representation is tyranny', and with the other seizing the billions of dollars paid in taxes by women to whom he refuses 'representation'. Behold him again, welcoming the boys of twenty-one and the newly made immigrant citizen to 'a voice in their own government' while he denies that fundamental right of democracy to thousands of women public school teachers from whom many of these men learn all they know of citizenship and patriotism, to women college presidents, to women who preach in our pulpits, interpret law in our courts, preside over our hospitals, write books and magazines, and serve in every uplifting moral and social enterprise. Is there a single man who can justify such inequality of treatment, such outrageous discrimination? Not one ....

"Second, the suffrage for women already established in the United States makes women suffrage for the nation inevitable. When Elihu Root, as president of the American Society of International Law, at the eleventh annual meeting in Washington, April 26, 1917, said, "The world cannot be half democratic and half autocratic. It must be all democratic or all Prussian. There can be no compromise," he voiced a general truth. Precisely the same intuition has already taught the blindest and most hostile foe of woman suffrage that our nation cannot long continue a condition under which government in half its territory rests upon the consent of half of the people and in the other half upon the consent of all the people; a condition which grants representation to the taxed in half of its territory and denies it in the other half a condition which permits women in some states to share in the election of the president, senators, and representatives and denies them that privilege in others. It is too obvious to require demonstration that woman suffrage, now covering half our territory, will eventually be ordained in all the nation. No one will deny it. The only question left is when and how will it be completely established."

Success finally occurred in 1920. Carrie advised that much more remained to be done:

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Money to carry on this work has been given usually as a sacrifice, and thousands of women have gone without things they wanted and could have had in order that they might help get the vote for you. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it!

The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Understand what it means and what it can do for your country. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. No soldier in the great suffrage army has labored and suffered to get a "place" for you. Their motive has been the hope that women would aim higher than their own selfish ambitions, that they would serve the common good.

The vote is won. Seventy-two years the battle for this privilege has been waged, but human affairs with their eternal change move on without pause. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!"

Later in life, in 1936, Carrie reflected on all that had come before in an address delivered as a commencement speech to the all female student body at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She reminded the young women of their debt to the women of earlier generations:

"At the beginning of the Century, there was probably no school of so-called "higher learning for girls" in the entire world. Certainly, there were none in the United States. …By 1920, 30,000 girls had been graduated at colleges and at this time it is estimated that 372,914 women are attending colleges in this country or approximately 40% of all college students.

"All that The Woman's Century achieved, the women, who were its propulsive force, bequeath to you. I think they would like me to add one reminder. All the workers in that Century labored with a common motive. Worded by Mary Wollstonecraft this was: 'Women should advance and not retard progress'. For myself, let me say that those who work for a great cause receive comforting satisfaction in the knowledge that they will leave the world better than they found it."



Carrie formally entered the political arena in 1920 when she was nominated to become the Single Tax Party's Vice Presidential candidate. I have not been able to learn whether the voting for her was significant. The convention chose R.C. Barnum as its candidate. To what extent Cattie remained involved with the election campaign in 1920 or subsequent years requires further research. In 1920 she co-founded the League of Women Voters, and in 1925 she helped to establish the Committee on theCause and Cure of War (serving as Chair until 1932). Carrie died at her home in New Rochelle, New York, in 1947.