by Elaine Weiss
Catt returned to Memphis in 1900 as the featured speaker at the Tennessee Equal Rights Association state convention and again in 1916, as the newly reelected president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, attempting to heal the rupture within the state’s suffrage ranks. To her mind it was a stupid argument: the Memphis ladies didn’t like the Nashville and Chattanooga ladies; their noses were out of joint because Memphis hadn’t been chosen for the 1914 NAWSA convention. It wasn’t about tactics or ideology or anything significant; it was a catfight, plain and simple.
Catt had naively thought she could breeze into town and broker a peace accord, but she failed. The warring Suffs kept at one another for several more years. At the same time, Catt had her own suffrage rift to deal with, the one with Alice Paul and her contingent, but that was about strategy and philosophy, she believed, not personality. The Tennessee women did manage to patch things up enough to put a limited suffrage bill through the legislature the previous year. But it was by all accounts a near thing.
They were splintered anew by this gubernatorial race. Suffragists opposed to Governor Roberts refused to work with Suffs who supported him. The governor refused to work with any suffragists who opposed him in the primary—or even women whose husbands opposed him—all those he considered his enemies. Republican Suffs were leery of working with Democratic Suffs, lest a Democratic state get credit for putting the amendment over the top. And then there were the Woman’s Party people, going their own unpredictable, and to Catt’s mind unhelpful, way; at least there weren’t too many of them here. Competing ratification committees were being formed. Separate polls of the legislature were being taken. There was harping all around. Catt had no patience for this; it was embarrassing and dangerous.
She knew that if the political men of the state discovered such internal strife among the Suffs, they could easily dismiss the campaign for the amendment as a “woman’s fight” and find plenty of excuses for declining to ratify. They’d unpack the old chestnuts: women were too emotional, too high-strung, for the rough-and-tumble of political life, too inclined to hair-pulling spats. Catt resented having to play referee in this sorority squabble; the issues were so petty, so parochial. For heaven’s sake, she had just convinced the British, French, and Germans to peaceably work together.
Just a few weeks earlier, at the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Geneva, she’d had to walk gingerly through the grim emotional detritus of the recent war. As president of the alliance, Catt was thrust into the role of conciliator among women whose nations had been slaughtering one another for four years. Some of the European delegations initially refused to attend the conference if the German representatives were present; Belgium did not attend. If they couldn’t agree to sit in the same room again, the alliance was doomed. Behind the scenes, Catt maneuvered the agenda to take resolutions of blame and retribution off the table. Then she initiated a teatime diplomacy, inviting the British, French, and German leaders to her room before the conference began. She fed them tea and sweets, got them talking, coaxed them to set aside their anger and grief, fix their sights on their common goal of helping women achieve political and economic equality. Over pastries, the head French delegate extended her hand to her German counterpart. The conference was saved. Catt had quietly, cunningly, defused an explosive situation. Somehow, Tennessee seemed more daunting.
Not that Catt was ever a woman to shrink from a challenge. She possessed a serene confidence and a steel-sheathed-in-velvet manner for getting her way. When her father had discouraged Carrie’s plans to go to college (a girl didn’t need that sort of education, and in any case, he couldn’t afford to send her), she wasn’t deterred; she simply found a job teaching school and saved enough money to put herself through Iowa Agricultural College, washing dishes and stamping library books to pay her board. When she joined the literary society and was told only the male students could give orations, she broke school tradition by insisting that female students also be allowed to speak publicly. Her male classmates had a debating society, so she formed a female debating counterpart. The men had compulsory military drills, so she petitioned that the coeds be offered the same kind of physical training. She graduated first in her class. In three years.
After Carrie decided to become a lawyer, but didn’t have the funds for law school, she prepared by reading under a prominent attorney and working in his office to earn money. She was surprised one day to receive a telegram offering her a job and a salary she could hardly refuse: come to Mason City, Iowa, and become principal of the high school. She thought she was taking only temporary leave of her law books, but soon she found herself promoted to the post of superintendent of schools in Mason City, one of the first women in the nation to be appointed to such a position. There was considerable skepticism about this twenty-four-year-old woman’s ability to tackle the district’s administrative and morale problems: student discipline and truancy were at a point of crisis. The new superintendent needed to prove her mettle.
On her first day in office, Carrie Lane taught her high school classes in the morning and then began to make the rounds of the other district schools. In her handbag she carried a two-foot-long leather strap, which she had recently bought at a harness shop, a handle loop sewn on one end made to fit her hand. She walked into the first school, reviewed the list of recent truants and misbehaving boys, and called them out into the hall, one at a time, asking them to bring a chair with them. She instructed each boy to remove his coat and lean over the chair and proceeded to use her strap to teach him a painful lesson. She made her way through the other district schools, inflicting pain and tears. When she returned to her office she placed the strap conspicuously atop her desk, settling the matter of her resolve. It was a useful exercise for her future career in suffrage politics.
Superintendent Lane soon gained an admirer in town: Leo Chapman, the handsome publisher and editor of the Mason City newspaper, who was dazzled by the tall, dark-haired, silver-tongued Carrie. Leo brought Carrie into the newsroom to join him as coeditor and publisher. They were true partners. But barely eighteen months after their wedding day, Leo was dead, typhoid taking him at age twenty-nine. A stunned young widow, Mrs. Carrie Chapman demonstrated the sort of resilience that would become a hallmark of her character and her legend. This talent, for bouncing back and pushing forward, proved essential at every crossroads of her life. Carrie spent the next four years as a single working woman, scraping together a living writing freelance articles, editing newspapers, and giving public lectures on various topics. She suffered the kind of crude sexual harassment so common in the workplace: a businessman she was interviewing grabbed her and tried to force himself upon her, thinking any working woman must be a “loose” woman. She was horrified and began to understand what women faced when they ventured into a man’s world.
Carrie also began earning money as a paid field organizer, first for the temperance society, then for the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association. While she’d always been a strong supporter of the suffrage movement, ever since that moment in her family’s kitchen, she hadn’t thought of it as a career. Veteran suffragists quickly recognized her potential. She was a brilliant speaker, brimming with what people called “magnetism,” and she was an organizational dynamo. She soon gained notice in national suffrage circles. Susan Anthony kept a close eye on this up-and-coming Iowa Suff.
In 1890 she married again, giving her hand to George Catt, a civil engineer who was making a name for himself, and a very comfortable living, as a bridge builder on the West Coast. They became “a team to work for the Cause,” as Carrie liked to put it. George gave her the economic freedom and the loving support to devote herself to suffrage work. “My husband used to say that he was as much a reformer as I,” Carrie once explained, and his role was to “earn living enough for two . . . and I could reform for two. That was our bargain and we happily understood each other.”
Carrie and George moved to New Yor
k City, where George had his own engineering business and Carrie worked with Susan Anthony as a national organizer of suffrage campaigns. She became one of “Aunt Susan’s Girls,” part of a coterie of young apprentices and acolytes—“nieces,” as Anthony affectionately considered them. In 1900, Anthony chose Carrie to succeed her as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, believing she possessed the skill and the fire to carry the Cause into the twentieth century.
It was rumored that Carrie and George had long ago signed a nuptial contract guaranteeing her two months each spring and fall to travel, wherever she was called, for suffrage organizing. It’s doubtful there was ever any such contract; that would be much too formal and legalistic a way to express the manner in which the couple worked together. They simply had a mutual, silent, agreement. They were a team, for the fifteen years of their marriage, until George’s health began to deteriorate. Carrie resigned the presidency to take care of him, but he died soon after, at forty-five, in 1905.
Carrie was shattered; she lost interest in suffrage, her own health collapsed. She moved out of the comfortable Manhattan apartment she’d shared with George—the memories were too painful—moved into a hotel, and asked her suffrage lieutenant and friend Mary “Mollie” Garrett Hay to stay with her as her roommate. She couldn’t bear to be alone. She and Mollie had been together ever since, living and working as a new team.
With Mollie’s help, Carrie slowly recovered, submerging her grief (she lost George, her mother, her brother, and Susan Anthony all within the space of two years) in work. While she kept her hand in the affairs of the National Association as a vice president, she redirected her energies into building an international suffrage movement, cofounding the International Woman Suffrage Alliance with her friend Millicent Fawcett of England. She made an around-the-world trip to survey the condition of women—in China, the Philippines, Africa, and India—and to spark new suffrage groups. She came back to New York, home to Mollie, and they embarked upon a quest to win the vote for themselves.
With the federal amendment stalled in Congress, Carrie and Mollie set their sights on increasing political pressure by winning suffrage in a trophy state, the nation’s most populous: New York. Carrie and Mollie combined their talents to wage a New York state referendum campaign in 1915, which failed, but they went right back to work and succeeded in 1917. The victory convinced more nervous politicians that suffrage was a winning proposition and is credited with providing leverage for the federal amendment. In the midst of their referenda work, Mollie also encouraged Carrie to accept the presidency of NAWSA once again in late 1915, convincing her that she was needed to steer the listing mother ship of suffrage, which seemed to have lost its way. Then they worked together to execute Catt’s “Winning Plan” for the federal amendment and, over the previous year, to win ratification.
They were a formidable pair. Mollie liked the rough-and-tumble of backroom politics; some likened her to a Tammany Hall pol. Like Carrie, Mollie was a midwesterner, from Indiana; unlike Carrie, Mollie was very blunt, even abrasive. Many suffragists simply did not like her, and many were jealous of her close relationship with the Chief. They discussed politics as other couples might talk about the weather, as a natural phenomenon, subject to endless fascination. One friend said Carrie was a statesman, Mollie a politician, and together they were invincible. But it was hard for Carrie Catt to feel invincible this morning in Nashville.
Marjorie Shuler entered the room. She was tall and athletically trim, with lustrous dark hair, rosy cheeks, and full lips that usually broke into a ready smile. Today, however, poor Marjorie looked very haggard. She’d spent most of the past week chasing after the governor, his friends, and his many foes, all over the state. The reports she’d wired to headquarters could curl your hair. Catt at first assumed that Marjorie must be overreacting, being a bit melodramatic; she was young and impressionable. But now Catt sensed that Marjorie hadn’t been exaggerating at all.
The newest set of complications was that Luke Lea, former U.S. senator, influential publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, and political rival of the governor, planned to print a cutting satire of Roberts in his paper. The parody would emphasize Roberts’s political paranoia and his equivocating on the ratification issue, zeroing in on his insistence on a friends-only Ratification Committee. If this mockery hit the streets in the pages of the city’s leading pro-suffrage newspaper, it would embarrass the governor: he might renege on his promise to call the legislature into special session to consider ratification. And, he had hinted darkly to Marjorie, possibly withdraw his shaky support for ratification altogether.
During the past few days, Marjorie had frantically tried to broker a compromise. She’d tracked down the governor somewhere on the campaign trail and convinced a Nashville Suff with a car to drive her there. She’d pressed him to agree to recognize the official League of Women Voters Ratification Committee, chaired by his “enemies” Abby Milton and Catherine Kenny, alongside his own hand-appointed committee, headed by his loyal supporter Kate Burch Warner. He refused. He wouldn’t countenance Milton and Kenny; the most he would allow was appointment of a couple of neutral political women to his own Ratification Committee. Marjorie then motored all through the night, arriving back in Nashville at five in the morning, to present the compromise deal to Luke Lea. He rejected it.
“Newspaper attack on chief executive postponed only on condition of immediate arrival of our Chief,” Marjorie wired in a panicky telegram to NAWSA headquarters in New York. Catt fumed, but she was on the train to Nashville less than forty-eight hours later.
* * *
Catherine Kenny moved briskly through the downtown streets toward the Hotel Hermitage. The city was quiet, slow to wake on this summer Sunday morning, groggy from the heat. The shops on Church Street stood locked under rolled-up awnings; it was the Sabbath. Nevertheless, this was going to be a very busy day.
More than a hundred of the city’s most influential citizens would be coming to meet Mrs. Catt at the hotel. Kenny arranged it all, on very short notice, and was forced to handle all the social niceties and political intricacies of the occasion alone. Everyone was away just when she needed them. Anne Dudley, former Nashville and Tennessee state suffrage president and a vice president of NAWSA under Mrs. Catt, was still out west after the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Abby Milton, president of the new Tennessee League of Women Voters, who was also a delegate to the convention, was obviously taking the slow, scenic road home to Chattanooga. Kate Warner, the governor’s pet suffragist and newly named chair of his official Ratification Committee, had the audacity to be vacationing in cool Michigan. Kenny would be away, too, if she had any choice; Nashville in deep summer, at the bottom of the Cumberland Basin’s bowl, was not the most pleasant place to be.
Kenny booked Mrs. Catt into the Hermitage, the most elegant hotel in town. Mrs. Catt insisted she would stay in Nashville only two, at most three, days. She meant to set things on a proper course, then go home, as she’d done in other ratification states. In truth, Catt didn’t believe Tennessee could pull itself together to act on ratification at all, so no use staying very long. But Kenny had a different plan: Mrs. Catt must remain in Nashville to the end, till they put ratification through. They needed her.
Outside Catt’s hotel window, the Stars and Stripes flew above the Tennessee state flag atop the Capitol building. The state flag reflected an important truth: Tennessee had long been divided. With three bold white stars barely contained within a blue circle, floating in a sea of red, the flag offered a graphic depiction of the state’s three Grand Divisions and the historic regional tensions between the mountainous East, the rolling hills of Middle, and the flat deltas of West Tennessee. The mountaineers of East Tennessee (where cotton plantations and slaves were few) resisted secession during the Civil War and remained loyal to the Union, fighting against their Johnny Reb Tennessee brothers; the scars remained. The East Tennessee unio
nists stuck with the Republicans during the bloody Reconstruction period and long after. In 1920, East Tennessee remained a Republican Party stronghold in an overwhelmingly Dixie Democrat state; one-third of the legislators in the Tennessee General Assembly were Republicans, and they had the power to tip a balance. The big cities of each region sometimes acted like squabbling siblings: Memphis in the West Division jealous of booming Nashville in the Middle; Knoxville and Chattanooga in the East Division envious of the others’ wealth, swinging their allegiance for best advantage.
The Grand Divisions were also enshrined legally in the state constitution, specified in the judicial system and expressed culturally in distinct accents and even musical styles: Appalachian bluegrass in the East, gospel in Middle Tennessee, and Memphis blues in the West. These regional differences and animosities colored the general political landscape and certainly spilled over into the state’s suffrage groups. It was just a fact of life, something you had to take into account as a Tennessee Suff. But it was hard to explain clan fights to an outsider. Kenny had tried to capture the sense of things for Mrs. Catt with a dash of her usual down-home humor:
“You know we Tennesseans and Kentuckians are rather strong on ‘feuds,’” she’d told Mrs. Catt just the previous week. “Sorter drink it in with our mothers milk.” That was a nice way of putting it.