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Carrie Chapman Catt - Mississippi Valley Suffrage Conference, May 7-10, 1916 (Box 1, Folder 9)

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Biographical Sketch CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT M. G. Peck, 1941

Two American women have displayed genius in building up great mass movements of women demanding better ^social^ condition. The first in point of time was Frances Willard, founder of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The second is Carrie Chapman Catt, who led the woman suffrage movement for thirty years in a fight to the finish with a powerful, organized opposition in Congress and throughout the nation. The struggle ended August 26, 1920, with the writing of the Nineteenth Amendment into the constitution of the United States, giving votes to women. Having seen the triumph of one cause, Mrs. Catt turned without pause to devote her energies to another, - the cause of peace and disarmament.

FAMILY BACKGROUND In origin and up-bringing, Mrs. Catt follows a typical American pattern. She was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, January 9, 1859, the second of three children, her parents being descended from ancestors who came from England to Massachusetts in the early days of the colony. Her father's name was Lucius Lane; her mother's, Maria Clinton. When Carrie Lane was seven years old, the family moved to a farm near Charles City, Iowa, where she went to a district school and had a healthy outdoor childhood. She attended high school in Charles City, riding horseback five miles thither and back each day. She had a hungry mind and read every book she could get hold of during these early years, among them Robert Ingersoll's lectures and Darwin's Origin of Species. She taught a country school to earn money to go to College, took a four-year course at Iowa State College at Ames in three years, paying her way by washing dishes at nine cents an hour the first year, and assisting in the college library at ten cents an hour the last two years.

After graduation in 1880, she studied law for awhile, then became principal of the high school in Mason City, Iowa, and later was made Superintendent of Schools there. In 1885, she married Leo Chapman, editor-owner of the Mason City Republican, and helped him run the paper. After his death, a year later, she engaged in the newspaper business in San Francisco. There she came up against the bad conditions surrounding women in the business and industrial world. Before the year was over, she decided to do what she could to improve them and, with that purpose in mind, she went back to her home state of Iowa and began to lecture on feminist subjects.

ENTERS SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT As she pondered the problem of women's inferior status in society, seeking a definite point of attack, she became convinced that lack of political power was at the bottom of it, and allied herself with the Woman Suffrage Association of Iowa, becoming State Organizer in 1887. She was a good speaker and soon rose to prominence. In 1890, she was invited to address the National Woman Suffrage Convention In Washington, D. C., and there she met Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, and other famous women who had grown old in the cause to which she was a newcomer. From that time on, she was identified with the national movement to enfranchise women.

Following the convention of 1890, she married George W. Catt, a successful hydraulic engineer, who was in complete sympathy with her chosen career. The same year, she went into her first state suffrage campaign in South Dakota. It was a grim experience in a newly settled region burnt by a five years drought. During the next ten years, campaign followed campaign, four states granting full suffrage, others giving partial suffrage, still others refusing every concession.

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