The first pre-nup--myth or fact?

As the room was emptying after my lecture to the New Rochelle Historical Society a few weeks ago, I managed to get embroiled in brief but spirited disputation with the estimable woman who had chaired the meeting. My interlocutrice, long a stalwart of the NR LWV as well as the Historical Society, was eager to inform me that Carrie Chapman Catt had "invented the pre-nuptial agreement". The story was that CCC and her second husband, George Catt, had agreed in writing prior to their wedding that CCC would be free to travel around campaigning for suffrage several months of the year.

I had come to regard this tale as a legend, rather than some well-established fact--something in the cut-down-the-cherry-tree or threw-the-dollar-across-the-Potomac category. I did not believe CCC (or Carrie Lane Chapman, as she then was) would have married any man whose promises needed to be put in writing. I also knew that CCC had regularly and often exceeded the supposed 4-month per year limit in traveling away from home. But for the LWV veteran who raised it, that Carrie had invented the prenup was evidently a cherished belief.

Anyway, while preparing this blog post I engaged in a bit of research. Here's what Jacqueline Van Voris has to say on the subject in her biography of Catt (page 20): "A story circulated that the Catts signed a contract that guaranteed her two months each spring and fall to work on woman suffrage. If such a contract existed, perhaps it was one of their quiet jokes, or perhaps they drew it up to illustrate to others the nature of their private agreement."

Thus the best informed historian seems to portray the prenup story as a myth. What is fact is that George Catt's financial support for Carrie was vital to her career as a suffrage leader.

In sum, CCC invented many things--the LWV, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the organization committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the women's physical education program at Iowa State University--but the prenup? I don't think so.