Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt (born January 9, 1859 as Carrie Clinton Lane in Ripon , Wisconsin ; died March 9, 1947 in New Rochelle ) was an American women's suffrage leader who served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) for fought the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which in 1920 gave United States women the right to vote. Catt was twice president of NAWSA and founder of the League of Women Voters and the International Alliance of Women . Jacqueline Van Voris, a historian, puts her meaning this way:
“She led an army of voteless women in 1919 to pressure Congress to pass the constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote and convinced state legislatures to ratify it in 1920. And she was one of the best-known women in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century and was on all lists of famous American women "
(German: “She led an army of non-voting women in 1919 to pressure Congress to give them the constitutional amendment for women's suffrage, and convinced federal lawmakers to ratify it in 1920. And she was one of the most famous women in the United States in the first half of the 20th century; she was on every list of famous women in America. ")
Early years of life
Catt was born Carrie Clinton Lane in Ripon, Wisconsin , to Maria Louisa (Clinton) and Lucius Lane. She spent her childhood in Charles City . At the age of seven, the family moved to Iowa , where she started school. As a child, Catt was interested in science and wanted to be a doctor. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University ) in Ames, Iowa .
Catt's father was initially reluctant to allow her to attend college, but he relented but only paid part of the cost. To make ends meet, Catt worked as a dishwasher, in the library and as a teacher in rural schools during the semester break. Catt's entry year consisted of 27 students, six of whom were female. Catt joined the Crescent Literary Society, a student organization that aimed to improve learning techniques and self-confidence. Although only men were allowed to speak in gatherings, Catt broke the rules and interfered in a men's debate. This started a discussion about female participation in the group and eventually led to women being given the right to speak in the meetings. Catt was also a member of the "Pi Beta Phi" (secret society for women, founded on the model of male societies), founded a debating club for girls and advocated the participation of women in military drill.
After three years, Catt graduated on November 10, 1880 with a Bachelor of Science degree . She was the farewell speaker and the only woman in the senior year, she first worked as a paralegal, then became a teacher, and in 1885 she became superintendent of the schools in Mason City, Iowa . She was the first female superintendent in the district.
In February 1885 Carrie married the newspaper editor Leo Chapman, who died shortly after an attack of typhoid in California in August 1886 . She stayed in San Francisco, where she worked as the city's first female reporter. In 1890 she married George Catt, a wealthy engineer and a graduate of Iowa State University. He encouraged her to stand up for women's suffrage. Her marriage allowed her to spend a large portion of each year traveling campaigning for women's suffrage, a cause she was increasingly involved in in Iowa since the late 1880s.
Role in the women's suffrage movement
National American Woman Suffrage Association
Catt returned to Charles City, where she grew up, in 1887 and participated in the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association. Between 1890 and 1892 she served as the organizer of the "Iowa Association" and as the reporting secretary. During her tenure, Catt began working nationally for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and was even a speaker at the 1890 Washington DC convention. In 1892, Susan B. Anthony asked Catt to appear before Congress about the proposed amendment To speak women's suffrage.
Catt succeeded Anthony in her office as NAWSA president. She was twice president of this association; her first term ran from 1900 to 1904 and the second from 1915 to 1920. At the end of the first term, she resigned to take care of her sick husband. And she took over leadership of NAWSA again in 1915 when it was in dire disarray under the presidency of Anna Howard Shaw . During her second term in office, she expanded the association and raised many dollars in donations.
At the NAWSA Convention in Atlantic City , New Jersey, she unveiled her "Winning Plan" to achieve the Amendment to Women's Suffrage. She organized this planning to get senators and MPs from different states to support the women's suffrage movement. The goals of their campaign were to achieve women's suffrage at both the state and national levels, and to compromise voting restrictions in states that resisted change. During its presidency, NAWSA gained House and Senate support, as well as federal support for ratifying the amendment.
Under Catt's leadership, the association focused on success in at least one of the eastern states, because until 1917 only western states had allowed women to vote. So she led a successful campaign in New York State that finally allowed the vote in 1917. In the same year President Wilson and the Congress entered the First World War one. Catt then made the controversial decision to support the war effort. This positively changed the public's perception of the suffragists, who were now viewed as patriotic. The women's suffrage movement received the support of President Woodrow Wilson in 1918. After endless lobbying by Catt and NAWSA, the women's movement achieved its ultimate goal of passing the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In her efforts to achieve state by state women's suffrage, Catt sometimes capitalized on the prejudices of her age. In South Dakota, where women lacked the right to vote, she complained: “The murderous Sioux is given the right to franchise which he is ready and anxious to sell to the highest bidder.” (German: “The murderous Sioux has the right to Election, which he will willingly and impatiently sell to the highest bidder. ") In 1894, Catt urged the uneducated immigrants to be deprived of their voting rights - the United States should" cut off the vote of the slums and give it to woman "(German : Take away the right to vote from the slums and give it to women ". And when trying to win Mississippi and South Carolina, their argument in 1919 was:" White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage ". (German:" The white Dominance is strengthened not weakened by women's suffrage ")
NAWSA was by far the largest organization promoting women's suffrage in the United States. From her first outings in Iowa in the 1880s to her last outings in Tennessee in 1920, Catt led dozens of campaigns, mobilized countless volunteers (one million in the end), and made hundreds of speeches. After ratifying the 19th Amendment, Catt withdrew from NAWSA.
After retiring from the NAWSA presidency because of her second husband's health problems, Catt continued her work for women's suffrage as she worked for the International Women's Suffrage Alliance after her husband's death. In 1920 she founded the "League of Women Voters" to encourage women to make sensible use of their hard-won right to vote.
International women's suffrage movement
In 1902, Catt helped found the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which gradually accepted sympathetic organizations from 32 nations. She served as its president from 1904 to 1923. After her husband's death in 1905, Catt spent a large part of her time as president of the IWSA in the eight years that followed promoting equality in elections worldwide. After retiring from NAWSA, she continued to help women around the world gain the right to vote. The IWSA remained active as an association to this day, now as the International Alliance of Women .
Role during the world wars
During the 1920s and 1930s, Catt was active in anti-war affairs. She lived from 1919 to 1928 in the "Juniper Ledge" in Westchester County , New York , Briarcliff Manor parish, after which she settled in nearby New Rochelle.
At the beginning of World War I , Catt and suffragist Jane Addams were asked to found and lead an organization to promote peace. Catt hesitated, believing that men and women should work together on this. Reluctantly, Catt and Addams called a meeting to get support from the women's movement. Catt did not want to be the leader of this group because she believed that supporting the peace movement would damage her international work on women's suffrage. The leadership of the peace group would mean that it gave preference to one country over the other. From that meeting it was decided that NAWSA would help the government prepare women to take jobs while the men were away, and would also support the Red Cross . In addition, the group announced that women's suffrage would remain their first priority. Throughout 1917, Catt's attention remained heavily focused on women's suffrage, which led her to neglect work with the peace movement.
After the passing of the 19th Amendment, the Women's Suffrage Amendment, Catt returned to the peace movement. Because she did not want to join any existing organization, she founded her own organization with a group of like-minded people, the “National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War” (NCCCW).
During World War II , Catt gave up her role in the NCCCW, admitting that she had not had the intended success. This organization had only included white middle-class women, not all women. The abilities of the members had not been strengthened, but only trained in international politics.
In 1933, as a reaction to Adolf Hitler's seizure of power, Catt organized the "Protest Committee of Non-Jewish Women Against the Persecution of Jews in Germany" (protest committee of non-Jewish women against the persecution of Jews in Germany). The group sent a letter of protest to Hitler in August 1933, signed by 9,000 non-Jewish American women. He denounced the acts of violence and the restrictive laws against German Jews. Catt also pressured the US government to ease immigration laws so that Jews could more easily find refuge in America. She was the first woman to receive the American Hebrew Medal for her commitment.
The last event she helped organize was the Women's Centennial Congress in New York in 1940, a celebration of the feminist movement in the United States.
Death and recognition
On March 9, 1947, Catt died after a heart attack at her home in New Rochelle. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx , New York City, next to her partner for 20 years, Mary Garrett Hay.
Catt received recognitions for her work both throughout her life and thereafter:
- In 1926 she was featured on the cover of Time magazine .
- In 1930 she received the Pictorial Review Award for her efforts in international disarmament.
- In 1941, Catt received the Chi Omega Award at the White House from longtime friend Eleanor Roosevelt .
- In 1975, Catt was the first to be inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame.
- A postage stamp was issued in 1948 in memory of the Seneca Falls Convention , showing Catt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott .
- In 1982, Catt was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame .
- In 1992 the Iowa Centennial Memorial Foundation named her one of the ten most important women of the century.
- In the same year the "Iowa State University" established the "Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics".
- In 1992 the "Old Botany Building" on the Central Campus was renovated and renamed in 1995: Carrie Chapman Catt Hall.
- Anjelica Huston played Catt in the 2004 film Iron Jawed Angels .
- In 2013, she was one of the first four women to be honored on the Iowa Women of Achievement Bridge in Des Moines .
- On August 26, 2016, Women's Equality Day, a memorial donated by Tennessee Suffrage Monument, Inc. and created by Alan LeQuire, was unveiled in Centennial Park in Nashville, depicting images of Catt, Anne Dallas Dudley, Includes Abby Crawford Milton, Juno Frankie Pierce and Sue Shelton White.
Private life
In 1922/1923 she traveled to South America with her friend, the feminist Rosa Manus . Catt also joined the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
Although she was married twice, Catt did not live with her husband all the time. After the death of George Catt, she lived with Mary "Mollie" Garrett Hay, a suffragist leader from New York. Hay was not part of the international upper-class community that Carr gathered around him; but it was understood that they had a special relationship. Catt asked to be buried next to Hay, rather not with one of her husbands. Hay died in 1928. Then Alda Heaton Wilson moved in with Catt and remained as a secretary until Catt's death. Wilson was Catt's partner and later estate administrator, who donated six volumes of photographs and souvenirs from Catt's estate to Bryn Mawr College.
See also
literature
- Robert Booth Fowler: Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (1986).
- Jacqueline Van Voris: Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (1996).
- Mary Gray Peck: Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (1944).
- Nate Levin: Carrie Chapman Catt: A Life of Leadership (2006).
- Victor Grossman : Rebel Girls: Portraits of 34 American Women . Cologne: Papyrossa, 2012, pp. 158–171
Web links
- The Carrie Chapman Catt Girlhood Home and Museum (English)
- PBS Kids: Women and the Vote ( Memento of March 8, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on pbskids.org (English)
- Carrie Chapman Catt - Library of Congress (English)
- Carrie Chapman Catt on about.com (English)
- Timeline: Woman's Suffrage and Abolition Movement on coax.net (English)
- Alice Paul Institute (English)
- Biography at Women in History ( Memento from April 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- Carrie Chapman Catt in the database of Find a Grave (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jacqueline Van Voris: Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York City, Feminist Press at CUNY 1996. p. Vii. ISBN 155-8-61139-8
- ↑ Katja Wuestenbecker: "Catt, Carrie Chapman" in World War 1: the Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection Vol. 1 . Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014, p. 359.
- ↑ Mary Gray Peck; Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography , New York, HW Wilson 1944, pp. 30-32.
- ↑ Van Voris, p. 7.
- ↑ Van Voris, p. 8.
- ↑ Peck, p. 33.
- ^ Carrie Lane Chapman Catt Traditions, ISU Alumni Association.Retrieved December 14, 2013
- ↑ Van Voris, p. 9.
- ↑ Peck, p. 34.
- ^ Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, 1880-1958.Retrieved July 23, 2014
- ^ Carrie Chapman Catt Girlhood Home and Museum: About Carrie Chapman Catt
- ↑ McGuire, William, and Leslie Wheeler: Carrie Chapman Catt . In: American History, ABC-CLIO, 2017, accessed October 25, 2017
- ^ Biography Carrie Chapman Catt
- ^ Library of Congress; Carrie Chapman Catt
- ↑ Van Voris, p. 21.
- ↑ Candice Lewis Bredbenner: A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship . Berkeley, University of California Press 1998. p. 48
- ^ Roger Munns: University Honors Suffragette Despite Racism Charge In: Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1996. Retrieved September 2, 2013
- ^ United States Congress, Office of the Historian. Women in Congress, 1917-1990 . Washington, DC: USGPO, 1991, p. 208.
- ↑ National Register of Historic Places, Registration: Carrie Chapman Catt House, October 2003 ( Memento of the original from August 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 24, 2010.
- ↑ Schott, Linda. Middle-of-the-Road Activists Carrie Chapman Catt and the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War . In: Peace & Change , Volume 21, No. 1 (January 1996), pp. 1-21
- ↑ Carrie Chapman Catt
- ^ Carrie Chapman Catt, accessed April 2, 2011
- ^ David Nasaw: The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001, p. 489. ISBN 0-618-15446-9
- ↑ Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James: Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary , Harvard University Press 1974. S 312. ISBN 0-674-62734-2
- ^ The New York Times, March 10, 1947
- ↑ Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947)
- ↑ 5:33 pm, August 26, 2016: Women's Suffrage Monument Unveiled - Story . Newschannel5.com. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
- ^ Nashville's Newest Monument Celebrates State's Role in Women's Winning The Right To Vote . Nashville Public Radio. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
- ^ Rupp, Leila J .: Sexuality and Politics in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of the International Women's Movement . In: Feminist Studies , Volume 23, No. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 577-605
- ↑ Kristin Thoennes Keller: Carrie Chapman Catt: A Voice for Women . Minneapolis, Minnesota. Capstone 2006. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-7565-0991-0
- ↑ Andrea G. Radke-Moss: Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West . Lincoln, Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press 2008. p. 286. ISBN 0-8032-1942-3
- ^ Barbara Ward Grubb: Carrie Chapman Catt Digital Image Collection . In: Mirabile Dictu (Fall 2004) (Ed .: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library), Volume 8. pp. 14-16. Retrieved October 11, 2016
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Catt, Carrie Chapman |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American suffragette |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 9, 1859 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ripon , Wisconsin |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 9, 1947 |
| Place of death | Bronx , New York City |