1859-1947 Suffragist

Early Years.

Carrie Chapman Catt, a leader during the 1910s of the movement for a women's suffrage amendment to the Constitution, was born on a family farm in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1859. In 1866 her family settled in Charles City, Iowa, where Carrie attended a one-room schoolhouse until entering high school. In March 1877 she entered the Iowa State Agricultural College, where she paid her tuition with the money she had earned while teaching at a country schoolhouse. She graduated in 1880, the only woman in her class of eighteen students, and began reading for the law. But she abandoned her legal education to accept a teaching job in Mason City, Iowa, and in her second year at the school she became its superintendent. In 1885 she married Leo Chapman, a suffragist and editor of the local weekly, Republican, and she began writing about women's issues for the...