KATHARINE BEMENT DAVIS by Thomas C. McCarthy One of the most remarkable Americans of her era (1861-1935), Katharine Bement Davis (KBD) broke gender and racial barriers, initiated reforms and impacted diverse fields regionally, nationally and internationally. These included, but were not limited to, women's rights, urban sociology, penology, municipal government, social hygiene, sexual practices research, and higher education. KBD's appointment as Correction Commissioner in 1914 made her the first woman to head a major New York City agency, a distinction placing her center stage in the struggle for suffrage then taking place. That same year she ran as the suffragists' candidate for delegate-at-large to the state constitutional convention on the statewide ticket of the Progressives, then a major party. Thus KBD apparently was the first woman ever to run for New York statewide office on a major party slate. After serving two years as city Correction Commissioner, she chaired the City Parole Commission which she had helped create, the first such urban parole panel in the nation. Born in 1861 and raised in northwestern N.Y., she taught school 10 years to earn tuition to Vassar from which she graduated top of the class in 1892. A Brooklyn Heights girls academy science teacher and a Barnard College graduate student, she ran New York State's exhibit at the 1893 Chicago world's fair -- a working man's model home demonstrating scientific principles of nutrition and domestic hygiene. That led to her heading a settlement house in Philadelphia where she was supportive of W.E.B. DuBois' pioneering urban sociological study "The Philadelphia Negro." KBD returned to Chicago, where as a student of Veblen and friend of Addams, she became the first female political economy "fellow" to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. This post- graduate of a university founded by John D. Rockefeller Sr. would years later, as superintendent of the State Reformatory for Women in Bedford Hills, Westchester, N.Y., where she helped found the Bureau of Social Hygiene with JDR Jr. Started to launch a center for evaluating inmates to determine suitable sentencing, the bureau developed much later into a major force for various research, including sexual practices, this long before Kinsey. During World War I, Davis was a leading figure on the "home front" in the fight against sexually-transmitted diseases. After WWI, she helped raise millions of dollars in relief funds for war widows and orphans in Europe and organize a first international conference of women medical professionals. She played a noteworthy role in furthering a League of Nations probe into sex slave traffic worldwide. When KBD retired in 1928, more than 1,000 leading Progressive reformers filled a Waldorf ballroom to pay her tribute. She later moved to Pacific Grove, California, where she died in 1935. A fuller biography entitled "Correction's Katharine Bement Davis: NYC's Suffragist Commissioner" can be found at http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/kbd/kbdframe.html.