CARRIE Chapman Catt was a star of the women's suffrage movement. Some historians say her dynamic leadership might have been crucial in amending the Constitution in 1917, winning for women the right to vote.

She founded the League of Women Voters.

A building was named in her honor last year at her alma mater, Iowa State University.

In her zeal for the vote, however, Carrie Catt left a less admirable legacy. Today, it's hard to know if she was expressing her personal views or simply playing the campaign con game of give-'em-what-they-wanna hear.

She assured the South, "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage."

She called the ballots of proletarian voters

"undesirable," promising that women's votes would defeat them.

She referred to Indians as "savages."

Whatever her motivation, whether personal or political, she brushed the women's movement of her day with a tar of racism and classism that clings to us still.

To the argument that she was only a product of her time, an Iowa State protester retorts: "People treating people with dignity is not something bound by time; it's a basic principle."

Amen to that.

Products of the same era include Jane Addams at Chicago's Hull House, Lillian Wald and Margaret Sanger in New York City, Mother Jones in West Virginia and Colorado. They, and many like them, were, like Carrie Catt, women of relative privilege. But they advocated for rights of the poor, the foreign-born, for former slaves and their children, for Native Americans.

Mother Jones concluded that working for the vote was a farce. Revolution, she said, would be more to the point. But she was an exception. Most suffragists fervently believed that if women could vote, they could change the world.

What must they have felt, learning of Catt's statements, delivered in their names?

Of course, there is another question: If we are to honor only the unflawed heroic figure, who is there left to honor?

Maybe two plaques should be installed on the front door of Carrie Chapman Catt Hall. One would identify her accomplishments. The other would articulate Iowa State's philosophy, perhaps something along the lines suggested by George Jackson of the Ames chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People:

"Today, this university does not tolerate racism in any form or fashion."

Berkeley writer Ronnie Gilbert, member of the folk-singing Weavers in the blacklist era and later a concert artist in her own right, performs a one-woman musical play titled "American Agitator." As "Ronnie Gilbert on Mother Jones," it was published by Conari Press (1993).&lt;