Woman suffrage leader's speech spurred on the formation of women's rights organization in the city.
It was a prediction concerning the equality of women that has not yet come to fruition.
"Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, prominent in woman's suffrage circles, predicts that before the end of the new century this country will have a woman President."
The words were published on the editorial page of the Evening Repository on Sunday May 20, 1900, following a lecture Catt gave at Canton's City Hall. Catt, then president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, spoke on "Equal Suffrage," and her speech served as a call to verbal arms to the women of Stark County.
"SUFFRAGE," shouted a headline on the front page of the newspaper the day after her talk, which another headline said was "Heard By a Large Audience, Including a Number of Men."
"Women of Canton to Organize," reported a third headline.
Catt was introduced by former Canton Mayor James. A. Rice, who said "it is not a question of whether equal suffrage is a fad or whether it is a fashion at the present time, but a matter of right." When Catt took to the podium she offered familiar words that echoed a quotation that frequently is attributed to her: "In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing else."
The Repository paraphrased the essence of her words.
"Mrs. Catt said that women have the right to the liberty to be, to think and to act and she thinks that the best way to attain these rights is through the ballot."
Timely words
As National Women's History Month proceeds to its final days, it seems an appropriate time to consider Catt's words, which were frequently heard and read in Canton during her time leading the woman suffrage movement.
She wrote a column that appeared regularly in the Repository.
"College women are now far too numerous to be regarded as an innovation," Catt wrote in a column supporting widespread college education for women that appeared in the newspaper on July 20, 1902, "and their achievements have been too important to consider them longer as an experiment."
Among many other of her columns published by the newspaper, Catt posed a question to readers about women in the workforce in a column published in the Repository on Jan. 24, 1904.
"Will the activity of women in wage or money-earning occupations disrupt the home?" she queried, before answering the question with the identification of what she viewed as gender-less rights. "Time will demonstrate that there is as a great diversity of talent among women as among men, and that no restriction must be put upon either in the choice of a vocation."
It was in a column published by the Repository on May 24, 1903, that Catt wrote optimistically about the topic she with which she was most associated, woman suffrage.
"In the United States we do not move any faster than is desired by the whole people," Catt wrote. "But, slowly though we advance, the cause of women suffrage is surely gaining headway."
Many visits
Before, during, and after her tenure as president of the national woman suffrage organization, Catt was a familiar person in Canton. She already had made several trips to the city to speak when she gave her lecture in 1900, and she returned to Canton for talks, including one given in June of 1914. During that speech she called Ohio a "pivotal state" with "progressive voters" who would soon put Ohio "on the suffrage map."
"Even the opponents of woman suffrage no longer question the eventual coming of the ballot for women -- they now ask, where will it come next," she said while sitting in the Courtland Hotel in Canton. "The coming of suffrage for women sooner or later is a settled fact. We do not recognize defeat and if the men say (to) us nay at one election we immediately make plans for another.
"We must continue to push forward the work in the states ... the work to secure a federal amendment to the constitution started by Susan B. Anthony."
Catt said that Ohio voters had both "a responsibility and a privilege" to approve progressive legislation that moved woman suffrage forward.
"As soon as men recognize the simple justice of it all, that women are human beings and now many of them are economic units entirely independent of men, that they have been forced into an industrial world with no voice in the making of conditions therein, political equality will speedily come."
About Catt
A Repository story reporting on Catt's 1914 visit recalled that the woman who led women in fighting for their rights was born in Wisconsin and raised on an Iowa farm. She was superintendent of public schools of Charles City, Iowa, the newspaper noted, "long before the days of women school superintendents."
When Catt took over the helm of the international woman suffrage alliance in 1904, the organization had seven affiliated national associations, including the one of which she had president until 1904. Her leadership helped the international group of organization grow to 27 associations, reported the Repository.
"Last year she tried to resign from the presidency of the international ... but the delegates from all the united societies, representing nearly every country that has constitutional government, refused to consider any other candidate, said the 1914 Repository article.
Catt eventually was allowed to retire from her international post. Then in 1915 she returned to the presidency of the national organization, which was called the National American Woman Suffrage Association after the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1919, Catt founded the National League of Women Voters, a non-partisan organization.
"Mrs. Catt saw her long campaign succeed in 1920 with the adoption of the 19th amendment to the federal Constitution," said Catt's obituary, which was written by the Associated Press and published in the Repository on March 10, 1947.
Second cause
That obituary, in which President Harry Truman was quoted as saying that Catt's death meant "an era in our national life comes to a close," noted that woman suffrage was not the only cause which the activist espoused. Catt "entered the fight for world peace after her unflagging crusade for women's suffrage had succeeded."
"President Woodrow Wilson named her to his woman's committee on national defense during World War I," her obit said. "Only two days before (she died), she had told her biographer, Mary Gray Pack, that she hoped to live to see the United Nations become a 'going concern.'"
The references in her obituary to status as a peace advocate helped some readers of the Repository recall yet another speech that Catt had given in Canton -- one in 1926 given in the Courtland to members of the local League of Women Voters, appearing as founder of the national women voters organization.
Her main topic that night was not voting, but rather peace.
"Let arbitration take the place of the battlefields," she said, noting that in war "might makes right," but in arbitration "right makes might."
During her talk in Canton on March 12, 1926, Catt observed that, "We are the greatest people in the world to devise new ideas and the slowest to follow them."
And we are slow in correcting our mistakes.
"Is the human race civilized enough to banish war?" she asked in her 1926 lecture.
"All down the ages from the beginning of time, great men have deplored war, but no one has known how to fulfill this wish. No one among them seemed to realize that war was a man-made institution and that man would have to remove it before it ceased to be. With the accumulation of knowledge and progress of all kinds, wars grow more terrible."