Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch

• Harriot Blatch
• Born: January 20, 1856
• Died: November 20, 1940

A leader in the campaign to achieve woman suffrage, was born in Seneca Falls, New York, to Henry Brewster Stanton and Elizabeth (Cady) Stanton, descendants of English settlers. She was the sixth of seven children and the younger of two daughters. Her father, a lawyer and state senator (1849-53), was an ardent abolitionist; her mother was a founder of the American feminist movement.

She was educated in private schools in Seneca Falls, New York City, and Englewood, New Jersey. She was graduated from Vassar College with honors in 1878, and in 1894 received an MA. from Vassar although she was then residing in England. After receiving her bachelor’s degree and spending a year at the Boston School of Oratory, she traveled abroad as a tutor (1880-81).

Upon returning to the United States, she helped her mother and Susan B. Anthony compile their History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., 1881-1922). Her account of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), one of the two wings into which the suffrage movement had split in 1869, is credited with helping ease the reconciliation of the AWSA with the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), in 1890.

In 1882 Harriot Stanton married William Henry Blatch, a British businessman, with whom she lived for twenty years at Basingstoke, about forty miles from London. Their first child, Nora, was born in 1883; their second, Helen, born in 1892, died in childhood. William Blatch was accidentally electrocuted in 1915. In England Harriot Blatch became deeply involved with various reform activities, especially woman suffrage. She also became a member of the socialist Fabian Society and met Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw.

When the Blatches took up residence in New York City, in 1902, she continued her suffrage work in the United States. She found that the movement was in a rut: “It bored its adherents and repelled its opponents.” What was needed was political insight. She wanted to apply to the American scene the same kind of politically minded organizing activity that had been successfully used by suffragists in England. There existed an American model, she noted, in the Anti-Saloon League, often called the first political pressure group in United States history.

Blatch began her efforts among the thousands of working women on the Lower East Side of New York City. There she discovered enormous support for suffrage, which was viewed as a means of reducing sex discrimination. In 1907 she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, which also included professional women. In the next several years the league held innumerable meetings and rallies throughout the New York City area. The first suffrage parades were held under its auspices.

The next step was to raise the state legislature’s consciousness about suffrage. In 1907 Blatch and other suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, inaugurated a series of annual appearances before the legislators in Albany, on the theory that “the harvest ripens more rapidly in a legislative body than in a constituency of wide-flung unrelated individuals.” The league’s membership was catalogued according to political districts to facilitate organizing members into small pressure groups when needed. These techniques underlay the annual campaigns for a state suffrage amendment that began in 1910 and succeeded in 1917.

Meanwhile, the league, which had been reorganized as the Women’s Political Union, merged with the Congressional Union, founded in 1913 to promote a federal suffrage amendment. In 1917 Blatch helped merge the Congressional Union with the Woman’s party.

The entry of the United States into World War I, in April 1917, turned Blatch’s attention to other matters. She became head of the speakers’ bureau of the Food Administration and a director of the Woman’s Land Army, which provided female farm workers. By the time of the Armistice, in November 1918, Congress had passed the Nineteenth Amendment, and Blatch’s energy was redirected to equality of rights. She supported the campaign by the National Woman’s party for a federal Equal Rights Amendment and chaired its congressional committee for several years. She also urged regulations against child labor, and for prohibition of dangerous working conditions, but she opposed generalized protective labor legislation for women. She wanted more women in trade unions, however. During the 1920s she ran unsuccessfully as a political candidate on the Socialist party ticket.

Harriot Stanton Blatch died at eighty-four, of a heart attack, in a nursing home in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City. Like her mother she had a flair for the dramatic. Her Equality League, organized at a time when the suffrage cause was languishing, gave the movement an invigorating jolt that contributed greatly to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Aside from her contributions to the History of Woman Suffrage, and her autobiography, Challenging Years (with Alma Lutz, 1940), Harriot Stanton Blatch wrote Mobilizing Woman-Power (1918) and Woman’s Point of View (1920). With her brother Theodore she edited Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (1922). Twelve volumes of her papers are in the Library of Congress; others are in the possession of her daughter, Nora Stanton Barney, and of Harriet Allaben. In addition to her autobiography, useful information and a bibliography may be found in Notable American Women (1971) and the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, November 21, 1940.