Catt, Carrie Chapman (1859-1947)

US women's suffrage leader; president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association 1900-04 and 1915-47. Working at both state and federal levels, she played a major role in pushing through the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (adopted in 1919 and ratified in 1920), which guaranteed women aged 21 and over the right to vote in the USA (see Amendment, Nineteenth).

Catt was born and raised on a farm near Ripon, Wisconsin. She graduated from Iowa State College in 1880, and went on to become a principal and then the first female superintendent of schools in Mason City, Iowa. In the late 1880s she began to organize and lecture at suffrage meetings, and founded the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. Catt served as president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance 1902-23 and was a founding member of the League of Women Voters in 1919. After the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, she became active in the international peace movement and founded the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War in 1925.