Blatch, Harriot Stanton

BLATCH, HARRIOT STANTON (1856–1939). Daughter of the nineteenth-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch was herself a major leader of the twentieth-century woman suffrage movement. She was one of the pioneers in bringing working-class women into the movement and in adapting the modern, militant style of the British suffragettes to the American scene. Born in 1856 to Elizabeth Cady and Henry Brewster Stanton, she graduated from Vassar in 1878 and shared with other early college women a deep faith in science, including social science. She went to Europe to continue her studies and in 1882 married a wealthy Englishman, William Henry Blatch. For twenty years she lived outside London and was active in the British suffrage movement and the Fabian Society. She also had two children, one of whom, Nora Stanton Barney, went on to become a feminist activist like her mother and grandmother. The other, Helen, died at age three.

When her mother died in 1902, Harriot moved back to the United States. She was swept up in New York City reform activism, especially anticorruption politics and the Women’s Trade Union League, but within the suffrage movement she found existing organizations too tradition-bound. In 1907, she organized the Equality League of Self Supporting Women, dedicated to recruiting wage-earning women and building links between them and professional women. The Equality League introduced to America the innovations of British suffrage militants. It also played a major role in reinvigorating the movement in New York but in the process was itself transformed. By 1910, Blatch was relying increasingly on upper-class women, who had enough money to organize a winning campaign; she also believed that the work of recruitment and “propaganda” must now give way to more explicitly political efforts.

In 1910, Blatch changed the name of her organization to the Women’s Political Union and began to concentrate on getting a woman suffrage referendum before the state’s voters, a lobbying effort that took three years. In 1913, the Women’s Political Union began to canvass the entire state for a 1915 referendum on woman suffrage. The measure lost by a significant margin, and Blatch’s democratic faith was temporarily weakened. While Blatch shifted her own efforts to votes for women at the national level, other New York suffragists resumed the state battle, and in 1917 a second referendum passed.

Meanwhile, Blatch and her followers joined forces with Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the Congressional Union, who were determined to force President Woodrow Wilson to support a woman suffrage amendment to the federal Constitution. While Paul preferred civil disobedience, Blatch advocated the strategic deployment of women already enfranchised to put pressure on the national Democratic Party. Embracing Blatch’s ideas, the Congressional Union renamed itself the National Woman’s Party. Blatch and Paul also differed over US entry into the World War I, which Blatch supported, believing that unified civic purpose and a powerful state would redound to women’s benefit. By the end of the war, she was profoundly disillusioned, and this, along with attacks on radicals and the impending enfranchisement of women, led her to join the Socialist Party as a way of declaring both her belief in the political process and in the need for a fundamental redefinition of its purposes. In 1924, she played an important role in the independent, pro-labor presidential candidacy of Robert La Follette.

Meanwhile, Blatch was also involved in the post-enfranchisement women’s movement’s redefinition of its agenda. Although an early critic of sex-based protective labor legislation (she wanted such laws to be extended to all workers), she did not support the Equal Rights Amendment advocated by Paul, because she did not think “equality” could be understood abstractly or legislated categorically. Her own agenda stressed economic independence for women, with special emphasis on the dilemmas of the working wife and mother, but these issues got little attention until the Great Depression. By then, Blatch was close to eighty, and her waning energy went to her own autobiography, Challenging Years, and to documentation of her mother’s historical contributions. She died in 1939 of complications resulting from a fall.

Blatch, Harriot Stanton, and Alma Lutz. Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch. New York: Putnam, 1940.

Blatch, Harriot Stanton. A Woman’s Point of View: Some Roads to Peace. Sydney, Australia: Wentworth Press, 2017 (1920).

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Coming of Woman Suffrage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997

Goodier, Susan and Pastorello, Karen, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Harriot Stanton Blatch Papers. Library of Congress Special Collections. https://www.loc.gov/item/mm82012997/

Harriot Stanton Blatch Papers, 1807-1936. Vassar College Special Collections. https://specialcollections.vassar.edu/collections/manuscripts/findingaids/blatch_harriot_stanton.html