I became a feminist when I was six years old. I had not yet discovered that I had been born amid a self-governing people and that the instrument employed for the process was a vote. In after years my observation that the United States discriminated against women in the distribution of votes and my enlistment in that cause for a lifetime was a mere incident in the bigger conviction that the affairs of the whole world were askew because the male possessed a dominating superiority and the female a surrendering inferiority complex. These phrases were not invented until a half century later, but an undefined sense of their meaning was the influence that set my small feet upon a trail from which, when grown larger, they were never permitted to stray. My conversion was painful but complete.
The day is deeply impressed upon my memory. The warm sun was shining brilliantly through the windows of a little school house in Ripon, Wisconsin, where I was born. The sweet smell of a bouquet of lilacs on the teacher's desk filled the room and marked the date as spring. I was feeling very self-satisfied, for a few days before my teacher had given me a bright penny, the class prize, for having skipped around in the 2's the most nimbly of any member of the class. We boys and girls were now taking another lesson in the multiplication table and were standing in a straight row with our little toes strictly lined on a crack in the floor, when suddenly, with a whirring clickety-clack, a little girl's hoopskirt settled in a ring around her tiny feet. Every boy snickered. The teacher, being a woman of discretion, gathered up the little girl, hoop-skirt and all, in her arms, and carried her off to the woodshed. Restored to convention, she brought her back and set her down with toes on the crack. Her little cheeks were burning, her eyes downcast, and tears were flowing down her face. Again every boy, good and bad, snickered and every little girl blushed.
EARLY FEMINIST EMOTION
Perhaps, instinctively, we knew that the big hoops our mothers were wearing were somewhat ridiculous and that our little ones could not be upheld by common sense. Whatever the cause, there was no girl in that school who did not know that our common sex was being maligned by the teasing male, and most of us felt a spirit of resentment rising in our young bosoms. School over, I seized the hand of the child who had experienced the disaster and ran (no child walks) flauntingly before the boy of the most offensive snicker and made a face at him. I never forgot the hot indignation I felt nor the sense of triumph when I gave him the most terrible grimace I could invent. Thus I became a champion; I had defended my sex!
When I was seven my parents moved from Wisconsin to Iowa. After having built a house upon a farm we were removed there and I went to the country school. On my first day a naughty boy just my age appeared with a long striped snake in his hand. The boy being seven, reason insists that the snake could not have been marvelous in length, but I recall it as about eight feet! The prairies of Iowa abounded in these harmless creatures, but as I had never before seen a snake, it would have been difficult to have persuaded me that they were less than the most dangerous thing alive. The boy chased the little girls with it and tauntingly threatened to twist it around their necks. When the bell rang we girls bounded through the door as one animate ball, no one willing to wait for another to pass. I sank into my seat thoroughly frightened and with my heart beating furiously.
BIRTH OF SELF-RELIANCE
That night, my brother, three years older than I and imitative as children are, found a snake and, following the example of the bad boy, chased me with it. He also made the same unpleasant remark about throwing it around my neck. I began to reflect that life would be one long horrid torment in Iowa, since snakes were plentiful and boys had so small a senses of the proprieties. I began to reason that if a boy can catch a snake and it doesn't hurt him, I can catch a snake and it will not hurt me. I suspected that a boy would find a cold clammy snake around his neck quite as uncomfortable as would a girl. So I planned for defense, and summoning all the grit I could muster to my aid, I sought the pasture, a tract of unbroken prairie. I did not go far before spying one of the striped enemies of woman wriggling its way through the long grass, and down upon his head my small foot went while I grasped its tail in my fingers and swung it at arm's length as I had seen the boys do. I did not like the feeling of it, but I observed that his snakeship was helpless when held in that fashion and my confidence increased. I was soon chasing my brother like a wild Indian and threatening to throw it around his neck. My suspicions proved correct; boys did not enjoy the anticipation of a snake as a necklace and it took only one lesson to protect me from the teasing boys of that district forevermore. Looking backward, I realize that that foolish little episode, happening at an age parents consider too young for lasting impressions upon children, was the moment when character was born and self-reliance established.
These two silly events set me going in the direction from which I could never turn aside; yet of what value can their telling be to girls of this day? Hoopskirts, let us hope, are gone forever and snakes only remain in rocky and swampy parts of our country. So, too, the influence, that I have always regarded as the most dominating upon my entire life, appears to have belonged strictly to my own generation.
DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION
In the year that I was born, Darwin issued his "Origin of Species." As all the world knows, a sharp and bitter conflict ensued between religionists and scientists, the latter being speedily converted to the Darwinian theory. When evolution was thirteen years old, I entered the high school, and I am quite certain that my parents and their neighbors had never observed the word evolution. There were two things I knew definitely when I entered that high school. One was that Baptists went to heaven and the other was that all the angels, from whatever race recruited, spoke English only!
I was an ordinary child in an ordinary high school in an ordinary Iowa town. What happened to me in that high school must have happened to thousands of other average boys and girls in many average towns and cities of this country fifty years ago. The disagreements in our text books were so conspicuous that the feeblest mind could not fail to detect them. Probably no child really sensed "the clash between creeds and science," but we did demand that the instruction in our textbooks should be reconciled. We asked unanswerable questions and became keenly aware that learning in high schools, instead of being administered by little dips into a fount of unchallenged truth, consisted in spots of unestablished facts. With repentant distinctness I recall certain hectoring queries put to our orthodox professor of history that must have given him sleepless nights.
READS DARWIN
A textbook on general history published in 1860 was written before the author had heard of Darwin and his theory. It set the origin of the human race as having occurred in an eventful week quite definitely fixed at six thousand years before. "The curse," recorded my history, "was accompanied by a promise. The toils of the man were to be rewarded by the fruits the earth would give to cultivation, and the woman in her suffering was consoled by the hope of a Redeemer." A small textbook on geology made a tidy agreement between Genesis and Darwin by the announcement that the six days of the creation were not the 24-hour days we knew, but geologic ages whose duration was not fixed and that the seventh day, when God rested from his labors, was the present perfected age in which we perfected humans were privileged to live. A textbook on physical geography, however, with no apology either to Genesis or Darwin, presented a complete theory of the evolution of the race and illustrated the story with pictures of men alleged to have been dead a million years. This was a pretty mess to be poured unexplained into children's immature heads by teachers who found that the safest way through the rapids was to ignore their existence.
The outcome for me was a firm determination to read "The Origin of Species," and I was able to borrow it from a scholarly neighbor. I did not entirely comprehend the book, but it left me with the impression that the world was full of delightful riddles, and that many of them would surely unfold in my lifetime, and I thus looked forward to coming years with eager anticipation.
I wanted to go to college, but Iowa farmers had little money and my father thought a daughter's college education a suitable cut in the family budget. It never occurred to me that the lack of money in the home exchequer was a sufficient reason for renouncing my hopes. One day I brought the news to my father that I was going to college and that I would earn the money by teaching. He replied cynically, "But you couldn't pass an examination. Certificates are necessary before you can teach." I joyfully confessed that the examination was over and the certificate in my possession. I waited for his recovery from this shock and for his next comment. "Well," said he, "you couldn't find a school to teach; no director would take so young a girl." Immediately I told my next secret. "Oh, father, I have a school, the contract is signed, and the school is right here in our district." As I lived at home, all my earnings for a year were laid aside for college expenses, but as I received $20 a month only in the summer and $28 in the winter, the year's work made no great sum.
COLLEGE DAYS
Meanwhile I studied college catalogs and filed them away with a sigh, for my small earnings would not enable me to choose a college. So it came about that I went to the Iowa State college, then ten years old and struggling, its chief recommendation being its cheapness. Many colleges of that day helped themselves by allowing students to perform for a low price some of the less skilled tasks necessary to carry on. That plan was abolished years ago, but most students did some kind of work in my college when I was in school. I washed dishes in my first year at nine cents per hour, but I was the happiest girl imaginable in my second when I was selected to serve as a second assistant to the librarian at ten cents per hour, and in my senior year I became first assistant. The hours of work were often long, but the ten cents per hour went far toward paying for board and books and there were plenty of calm moments for study in the hours of service.
Everyone in that college, with the exception of the professor of literature, from the president to the janitor was an evolutionist. The faculty had been recruited from young instructors at Harvard, Yale and Amherst, who had passed through the storm with which evolution had been assailed and had emerged, not mere converts but earnest crusaders. Evolution was served to us in botany, zoology, geology, psychology and all the other 'oligies." It was pointed out under microscopes, in laboratory crucibles, and the details of queer fossils. When we reached our last year the president took us in charge, and, with Herbert Spencer as chief textbook, we were taught the history of man, not as recorded in history, but in the findings of science.
I came forth from that college possessed by a conviction that the human race had climbed fast and far from its ancient beginning, that it was still climbing and that it would always climb higher and higher into some inestimable future perfection; that each generation will see truth a little more clearly and comprehend the rights and welfare of others a little more tolerantly; that the clash of opinion in our generation is due to ignorance on both sides which in time the race will slowly outgrow. Thus evolution is not chance nor a question of the identification of our first ancestor, but the obedience of all mankind to a universal plan, including the suns, moons, planets and all the mysteries of the limitless universe--God's immutable law.
EVOLUTION AND SUFFRAGE
Enlisted in the cause of woman suffrage, which that little hoopskirt made inevitable, this conviction proved a working faith that bore me on wings over many hard places. I have known coworkers, unable to endure the tortures of continual disappointment, to drop out of the suffrage army, and others to suffer despair in dark times, but my evolutionary faith, not only unfaltering sustained me through forty years of campaigning, but gave me a life of perpetual happiness. Pleadings before legislatures, political conventions or congress, or with voters when a referendum had been submitted, were to me “mere battles in a war certain to be won.” Looking backward, I regard the influence of this faith in God’s eternal law for the evolution of the race as the chief control of my life. It was a faith emanating from Darwin’s generation and born of the virile forces on both sides of the controversy in its young years. Probably it will never seem so personal, so all-embracing as it did to those of that generation who had to insist that textbooks should be harmonized.
I am somewhat amazed to discover that these influences I have recorded here, and many others I have not mentioned, belong completely to a generation that is passed. Other influences, newer and doubtless as vital, are moulding the lives of the next generation. There is one factor of my faith, however, that I should grieve to have others overlook.
If evolution of the race is a dependable faith, it follows that the opposition of causes is quite as important as the affirmative. A controversy waging long is but a wrestling bout, with truth emerging as an established fact, the inconsequential wrestlers forgotten. Both sides are needed to bring that truth uppermost. I cringe when I hear or read of the protagonists of a cause calling their opponents unpleasant names and questioning their motives, or the opponents making faces at an unanswerable argument. Both have failed to grasp the fact that the race is climbing and that together they are building a step on the stairs.
I was only one of a great army of women in a long struggle of seventy-two years. The pioneers were gone when I came into the movement and I only helped to carry on what they began. I did not choose my cause, the destiny of a hoopskirt set me on my way. For this I am grateful, for I give it as my firmest conviction that service to a just cause rewards the worker with more real happiness and satisfaction than any other venture of life.
Catt, Carrie Chapman. 1928. Carrie Chapman Catt Papers: Speech and Article File, 1892 to 1946; Articles; “Why I Have Found Life Worth Living,” Christian Century, March 29. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mss154040476.
Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.
Neither the Catt Center nor Iowa State University is affiliated with any individual in the Archives or any political party. Inclusion in the Archives is not an endorsement by the center or the university.