Kate Claghorn

Kate Holladay Claghorn (1864–1938) was an American sociologist, economist, statistician, legal scholar, and Progressive Era activist, who became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Claghorn was born on February 12, 1864 in Aurora, Illinois, but grew up in New York City. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1892 from Bryn Mawr College, and completed a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1896. She was part of only the third cohort of women doctorates from Yale – the school opened admission to women in 1892 and the first seven graduated in 1894 – and she became the first to receive her degree publicly, at Yale's commencement ceremony. At Bryn Mawr she studied political economy under Franklin Henry Giddings, and at Yale she studied "industrial history, advanced economics, political science, and anthropology" with William Graham Sumner and Arthur Twining Hadley; her dissertation was entitled Law, Nature, and Convention, a Study in Political Theory.

Claghorn became the first paid secretary-treasurer of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, the predecessor organization to the American Association of University Women, in 1898. She worked briefly for the US Industrial Commission, the Economic Year Book, and the US Census Office before joining the New York Tenement House Department as assistant registrar in 1902; she was promoted to registrar in 1906. Her $3000 salary made her the highest-paid female civil servant in New York. A magazine story at the time wrote:

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