Katharine Houghton Hepburn

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This picture is of Katharine Houghton Hepburn who was an active advocate in the fight for women's right to vote.

Katharine "Kit" Houghton was born in 1878 outside of Buffalo, New York. At Bryn Mawr College, she met Tom Hepburn, who she later married. Together they moved to Hartford, Connecticut where they raised their 7 children and remained for the rest of their lives. Known for their freethinking and social practices, Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn entertained a reasonable amount of people.  They would discuss social hygiene, sexual relations, male homosexuality, and lesbianism inside their homes and would encourage each of their children to question everything.

In Hartford, Katharine had openly begun to fight for women’s suffrage and against prostitution. She became co-founder of the Hartford Equal Franchise League, a prominent advocate for women’s rights, in 1913 whose membership rapidly grew to 20,000. Katharine also became president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association from 1910-1911 then again in 1913-1917. She helped suffragists picket the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. In 1917, Katharine begun to support the Woman’s Party under the leadership of Alice Paul until women were granted the right to vote in 1920.

During this time, Katharine was also advocating to legalize contraceptives for immigrant women, who were not of her own class. She understood that poorer women bearing children was a burdensome duty, seriously affecting their health, welfare, and psychological development. In 1921, she was the keynote speaker at the American Conference on Birth Control and in 1929 accepted Margaret Sanger’s offer to become the legislative chairwoman of the newly formed National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in Washington, D.C. (connecticuthistory.org). In addition, after the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, Katharine was asked to run for U.S. Senate but declined the request. Instead, after the amendment was passed, she followed the fame of her daughter, actress Katherine Hepburn, until she died in 1951.