Katherine Reed Balentine
Katherine Reed Balentine was an American suffragist and the founder of The Yellow Ribbon, a suffrage magazine.
Early life
Katherine "Kitty" Reed was born in 1878 in Portland, Maine, to Susan Prentice Merrill Reed and Thomas Brackett Reed. Her father was in his first term as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine's 1st congressional district. He eventually became Speaker of the House, and was on the record as opposed to women's suffrage, making his daughter's very public activism in favor of suffrage more newsworthy.Suffrage work and ''The Yellow Ribbon''
In 1906, Katherine Reed Balentine founded The Yellow Ribbon magazine, a monthly suffrage publication. The Yellow Ribbon magazine was later known as Western Woman. This magazine was a statewide California newspaper, based in Monterey.Reed was a leading figure in the National American Woman Suffrage Association ; in 1907, she was part of a NAWSA delegation which met with President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1908, she spoke before the national NAWSA convention in Buffalo, on the theme "Woman Suffrage at Home and Abroad". She led the Maine branch of NAWSA from 1916 to 1917, bringing her experience with the California suffrage movement to Maine's effort. In 1917 she was quoted as saying, "there is nothing radical about equal suffrage."