Katrina Brandes Ely Tiffany was an American civic worker and social reformer.
Background
Katrina was born on March 25, 1875 in Altoona, Pa. She was the daughter of Theodore N. Ely and Henrietta (Brandes) Ely. Her father, chief of motive power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was not only an able engineer but a man of great cultivation, a descendant of William Ely who went from the West Indies to Connecticut in 1670.
Her maternal grandfather, Dr. Charles von S. Brandes, a Hanoverian, emigrated to America in the 18306 and settled in Erie, Pa. , where he is said to have been the outstanding physician and surgeon of a large region. From him Katrina Ely absorbed an especial devotion to liberal ideas and unpopular causes.
Education
Educated by tutors and in private schools in Detroit and Bryn Mawr, she entered Bryn Mawr in 1893. At Bryn Mawr, under such teachers as Franklin Giddings, she developed the absorbing interest in civic, political, and philanthropic undertakings which were to characterize all her later life. She received the degree of A. B. in 1897.
Career
In New York, where she went to live, she interested herself immediately in city politics, and when woman's suffrage came to the fore she devoted much of her time and her money to it.
She became president of the College Women's Equal Suffrage League and recording secretary of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York; she was one of the foremost women speakers and debaters on suffrage, and traveled extensively through the state of New York throughout the suffrage campaign.
Her interest in party politics did not preclude her enthusiastic support of the New York League of Women Voters, of which she was a regional director at the time of her death. She was a member of the executive board of the Foreign Policy Association (1918 - 27), one of the founders of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and a contributor to its prize fund, an enthusiastic worker in the cause of world peace, and a strong supporter of the League of Nations.
Soon after her marriage she interested herself in the New York Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations, which sought to find positions other than teaching for women college graduates. It was largely through her efforts as chairman of the finance committee that the bureau became the important and outstanding institution of its kind in the United States, and served as a model for numerous others. For many years she was a trustee of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, and treasurer of the Sunnyside Day Nursery.
She died in New York, survived by her husband.
Achievements
Katrina Ely Tiffany was a dedicated and charismatic suffragist who held a number of important positions. She was the president of the New York Collegiate Equal Franchise League for five years, a recording secretary of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York, and chairman of the War Service Committee of the NAWSA.
Politics
Later she allied herself more closely with the Democratic party in the state of New York, and more than once took the stump for its candidates.
Personality
She he became at once an outstanding personality by reason of her personal beauty, her boyish spirit of adventure, her athletic skill, her fine intellect, and her love of people.
Her friends speak of her sincerity and utter simplicity, of "the cheerful gallantry with which she would challenge the inertia or the selfishness of society, " of the fact that always "she put truth in the first place. "
Connections
On June 24, 1901, she was married at Bryn Mawr to Charles Lewis Tiffany, son of Louis C. Tiffany. She had no children.
