Kate M. Gordon (1861 – 1932) was an American suffragist, civic leader, and one of the leading advocates of women's voting rights in the Southern United States.

[2] Gordon initially became involved in the women's rights movement in 1896 when she heard a lecture by Colorado suffragist Mary C. C. Bradford at a local Unitarian meeting.

[4] Gordon's first public organizing effort came in 1899, when she turned out women entitled vote by virtue of being property taxpayers in a special bond election to finance improvements in New Orleans' sewage and drainage system—a particularly critical concern in the city, much of which lay below sea level.

[4] In 1900, she addressed the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), where she met new president of the organization Carrie Chapman Catt.

[5] After leaving NAWSA in 1909, Gordon returned to her native New Orleans, where she became engaged in establishing the first hospital in the state of Louisiana for the treatment of victims of tuberculosis.

By this time Gordon had shifted her thinking from top-down national voting rights change—proposed constitutional amendments having been introduced unsuccessfully in every Congressional session since that of 1868—to a state and regional perspective.