Catt spent the next several years traveling across the U.S. Catt’s work, and that of her sister suffragists, paid off! Colorado voters approved the referendum in 1893. She stayed for two months, covering over 1,000 miles and visiting 29 of the state’s 63 counties. Catt’s first mission was to help pass women’s suffrage in Colorado. Impressed with the young woman from Iowa, Anthony took Catt under her wing. In 1890, she attended the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) national convention in Washington, D.C., where she met its president Susan B. With her husband’s enthusiastic monetary and moral support, Carrie Chapman Catt’s work for women’s suffrage really took off. For Carrie Catt, the move marked her permanent transplantation from the Midwest to the East Coast and her ever-increasing involvement with the national women’s suffrage movement. In the process, George invented a more efficient dredging process that made him wealthy, extended his reach nationwide, and provided financial stability for the couple. George Catt was a mechanical engineer whose ground-breaking work in dredging methods had led to his landing a much sought-after contract to dredge the Boston Harbor. In 1892, Carrie and George Catt moved to Boston for his job. Collections of the Library of Congress () She worked hard and soon blossomed as a charismatic speaker and organizational dynamo, honing her skills in reinvigorating stagnant suffrage campaigns. She realized the suffrage movement needed both organization and zealous energy. While deeply disappointed, Catt learned an important lesson – never again would she launch a campaign unprepared. Her first goal was to win suffrage for women in South Dakota but despite high hopes the 1890 referendum failed, much to Catt’s dismay. Through the Iowa Woman’s Suffrage Association, Catt threw herself into speaking for the cause, traveling throughout the western United States during the 1880’s and 1890’s, working for state-level voting rights. George Catt was a liberated man of the age and encouraged his wife to work for women’s suffrage, which she happily continued to do, moving her work onto a national level with his backing and support.
Carrie married her second husband George Catt in 1890. She married her first husband Leo Chapman, a newspaper editor of the Mason City Republican, in 1885, but their marriage was short-lived as Chapman died in 1886 of typhoid fever. She was one of the very few women at the time to hold such a position. Furthermore, she would be one of the leading suffragists whose lifelong work, especially her skillfully crafted “Winning Plan,” helped to make it happen.Īfter graduating from Iowa State Agricultural College, now Iowa State University, in 1880 – the only woman in her graduating class – Catt became a teacher, and soon after a schools’ superintendent in Mason City, Iowa. Nearly 50 years later, Catt would celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women’s constitutional right to vote. Young Carrie didn’t think it was funny at all, and was appalled by the unfairness that men could cast ballots but women could not. Her parents laughingly explained to their daughter that women couldn’t vote. She asked her mother why she wasn’t getting dressed to go too. Her family was politically active and on Election Day in 1872, Carrie’s father and some of the male hired help were getting ready to head into town to vote. When Carrie Lane Chapman Catt was 13-years-old and living in rural Charles City, Iowa, she witnessed something that would help to decide the course of her life.