(ABC 6 News) – This Women’s History Month, ABC 6 News is honoring North Iowa’s celebrated suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947).

Catt was born Carrie Clinton Lane in Ripon, Wisconsin, but moved with her family at age seven to a farm just outside of Charles City.

“She traveled a long way from the farm,” said Catt’s biographer Jane Cox. “She went around the world at a time when that was not something very many people did.”

At age thirteen, Cox said, “She had heard her mother and father discuss presidential politics and she was very interested in that. When the Election Day finally came, her father went to vote, but her mother didn’t.

“When she asked why her mother wasn’t going to vote,” Cox said, “Her father and mother told her women didn’t vote. And when she asked why that was, she was told that women didn’t go and fight in wars. And so they also didn’t vote. And she said at that time that when she grew up, she was going to try to change that because that was not a square deal, she said.”

Catt attended what would later be known as Iowa State University in Ames, graduating in 1880.

By the age of 24, she was named superintendent of Mason City Public Schools.

She was the hand-picked successor to Susan B. Anthony, and was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which would later become the League of Women Voters after the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920.

Catt died in 1947, and her girlhood home south of Charles City is preserved as the Carrie Chapman Catt girlhood home.