Robert Booth Fowler (Essay Date 1986)

SOURCE: Fowler, Robert Booth. "The Case for Suffrage: Catt's Ideal for Women." In Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician, pp. 61-76. Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Fowler identifies and analyzes the personal and social values that informed Catt's political position regarding suffrage.

Carrie Catt was not a great political philosopher or even an important contributor to political theory within the modest tradition of American political thought. She neither claimed to be nor wanted to be. Yet, outside her ideas, Catt cannot really be understood as a feminist politician. While they may not have soared much beyond her time and place, her ideas were integral to her definition of what she was doing and to how she was doing it.

Aileen Kraditor argues that the "woman suffrage movement had no official ideology," and Kraditor is undoubtedly...