Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch

Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch (born Jan. 20, 1856, Seneca Falls, N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 20, 1940, Greenwich, Conn.) was a leader in the woman suffrage movement in the United States.

Harriot Stanton was a daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and early absorbed a reformer’s zeal from her and from her father, Henry B. Stanton, an abolitionist, a politician, and a journalist. She graduated from Vassar College in 1878. After a year at the Boston School of Oratory and another traveling in Europe, she assisted her mother and Susan B. Anthony in completing their History of Woman Suffrage. Her principal contribution to the work was a hundred-page chapter on Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association, rival of Stanton’s and Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association.

In November 1882 she married William H. Blatch, an English businessman, with whom she lived in Basingstoke, England, for the next 20 years. During that time she moved in British reform circles, especially that of the Fabian Society, whose members included Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ramsay MacDonald, and George Bernard Shaw. In 1894 she was awarded an M.A. degree by Vassar for a statistical study of English villages.

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In 1902 the Blatch family moved to the United States, and Harriot Blatch soon became involved in the Women’s Trade Union League and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The latter, a coalition of the two old rival groups, she found to be apathetic and too concerned with internal affairs to be effective, and in 1907 she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. Under her leadership the Equality League enrolled thousands of working women who had never before been sought out by or attracted to suffrage organizations, and new life was quickly injected into the cause. Open-air meetings were organized, and on May 21, 1910, a mass parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City publicized the campaign, the first of many such public demonstrations. Older and more conservative suffragist leaders feared a backlash, but the new vigour of the movement produced results. In 1910 the Equality League’s name was changed to the Women’s Political Union, and in 1916 it was merged with the Congressional Union (later the National Woman’s Party) under Alice Paul.

On the death of her husband in 1915, Blatch regained her American citizenship (lost by marriage to a foreigner—a legal provision whose exclusive application to women she had bitterly protested) by naturalization; she spent 1915–17 in England settling his affairs. On her return she became head of the speakers bureau of the wartime Food Administration and a director of the Women’s Land Army.

After World War I and the successful conclusion of the suffrage campaign, Blatch remained active in women’s rights and socialist activities. She opposed special protective legislation for women, breaking with several older groups on that question, and worked through the National Woman’s Party for a federal equal rights amendment. Her books include Mobilizing Woman-Power (1918) and A Woman’s Point of View: Some Roads to Peace (1920). In 1922 she published Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences with her brother, Theodore Stanton. After an injury in 1927 Blatch lived in a nursing home. Her autobiography, written with Alma Lutz, was published as Challenging Years (1940).