Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn (February 2, 1878 – March 17, 1951) was an American feminist social reformer and a leader of the suffrage movement in the United States.

[1] In 1923 Hepburn formed the Connecticut Branch of the American Birth Control League with two of her friends, Mrs. George Day and Mrs. M. Toscan Bennett.

After her death, the girls' education remained a point of contention between the sisters and their uncle, Amory Houghton Jr. (1837–1909), the family patriarch and president of Corning Glass.

While Amory believed young women belonged in finishing school, Katharine had absorbed her mother's insistence on a college education.

[5][6] After completing preparatory studies at Baldwin School, her sisters, Edith and Marion, received degrees from Bryn Mawr in 1901 and 1906 respectively.

"[8] Earlier that year, Hepburn had played host to famed British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, who was visiting Hartford on a speaking tour.

[13] Having concluded her suffrage work, Hepburn allied herself with birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, a Socialist Party USA member, Industrial Workers of the World organizer.

In her autobiography, Sanger wrote of Hepburn: In her long public career she had learned great efficiency and […] she never let our witnesses run over their time.

'[16]In 1934, Hepburn, Sanger, Congressman Walter Marcus Pierce, and others met with the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. to rally on behalf of a bill which would allow doctors to disseminate contraceptive information.

Coughlin's on-air ministry coupled with the fact that Hepburn's daughter Katharine had by that time established a film career in Hollywood, led newspapers to announce the event under the headline "Radio Father v. Movie Ma.

Despite the defeat, TIME magazine afterward published an article noting the success of the Hepburn/Sanger birth control propaganda in yielding favorable local results for its cause.

[19] Throughout her career, Hepburn gave numerous speeches in cities around the East Coast, including speaking engagements at Carnegie Hall.

One early HUAC citation, from 1939, names Hepburn as one of "the overwhelming preponderance of fellow travelers" composing the CIO's National Citizens Political Action Committee, formed expressly "for the election of Franklin D Roosevelt and a Progressive Congress.

The HUAC report reads "the overwhelming preponderance of fellow travelers on the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism is convincing proof of Communist infiltration.

[33] Around 1903, Houghton met Thomas Norval Hepburn (1879–1962), a medical student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Together, Katharine and Thomas had six children over the course of 16 years, including:[35] During the early 1930s, Hepburn home-schooled her two younger daughters, Marion and Margaret.

[37] The regional Southern New England chapter of Planned Parenthood also sponsors a fund, the Hepburn Potter Society, "named in memory of two lifelong advocates of reproductive freedom."