page_title: Carrie Chapman Catt
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Carrie Chapman Catt / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Carrie Chapman Catt and Mary Garrett Hay receive ballots to cast their first votes for president in 1920.
context_page_description: Carrie Chapman Catt was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900-1904 and 1915-1920. She founded the League of Women Voters in 1920 and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904, which was later named International Alliance of Women. 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 "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".
context_section_description: In March 1883, the month Carrie Lane was promoted to superintendent of schools in Mason City, Iowa,  Leo Chapman purchased and began to publish the weekly Mason City Republican newspaper. A supporter of women’s suffrage, he and Lane became engaged and were married at the Lane family home on February 12, 1885. The two began publishing the weekly newspaper as co-editors. In May 1886, having sold the newspaper due to a libel suit, Leo left for San Francisco to find a job in a newspaper while Carrie stayed in Iowa and lived with her parents until he sent word that he had found work and a home for them. In August 1886, Carrie received a telegram that Leo was very ill with typhoid fever and she should come at once. By the time she reached San Francisco on the train, he was dead. While in San Francisco, she happened to meet George Catt who was walking behind her on a downtown street. The two had been in college together, and he was about to become the chief engineer for a San Francisco bridge-building firm. In August 1887, Chapman moved back to Iowa, but the two kept in touch. In spring 1890, Chapman took the train to Seattle, Washington, where Catt now lived. On June 10, 1890, the two were married.
  Theirs was the deep love of two mature and committed people, each of whom respected the other’s talents. The newly-named Carrie Chapman Catt even told of the arrangement they made before they married, “We made a team to work for the cause. My husband used to say that he was as much a reformer as I, but that he couldn’t work at reforming and earn a living at the same time; but what he could do was earn living enough for two and free me from all economic burden, and thus I could reform for two. That was our bargain and we happily understood each other.”  Both traveled extensively for their work, but also found time to travel together. On October 8, 1905, George Catt died from a perforated ulcer at the age of 45. George Catt had been a successful engineer and his estate left Catt financially independent for the rest of her life.
  Catt resided at Juniper Ledge in the Westchester County, New York community of Briarcliff Manor from 1919 through 1928 when she settled in nearby New Rochelle, New York. After George Catt's death, Carrie Chapman Catt lived with Mary "Mollie" Garrett Hay, a suffragist leader from New York. Hay was not a part of the international circle of elites that Catt aligned herself with; however, it was understood that they had a special relationship. Catt requested burial alongside Hay, rather than her first husband. Her second husband's body was donated to science, according to his wishes. When Hay died in 1928, Alda Wilson moved in with Catt and remained as her secretary until Catt's death. Wilson was Catt's companion and eventual estate executor, donating six volumes of photographs and memorabilia from Catt's estate to Bryn Mawr College.
caption: Carrie Chapman Catt and Mary Garrett Hay receive ballots to cast their first votes for president in 1920.
exif: {}