View from above American suffragette leader Harriot Stanton Blatch voices her disapproval of anti-suffrage speaker Richard Barry outside the Lyceum Theatre, United States, circa 1915.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Photo of Harriot Stanton Blatch
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Photo of Harriot Stanton Blatch
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Harriott, her mother, and her daughter Nora.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Harriot Stanton Blatch and New York suffragettes putting up posters announcing a forthcoming lecture by Sylvia Pankhurst.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Harriot Stanton Blatch speaking to a large crowd of men, Wall Street, New York City, ca. 1915-1920.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
From left to right, Eleanor Irving, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Senator Stillwell, Mrs. Arthur Townsend, and Mrs. John Rogers Jnr after the Women's Suffrage Movement march to Albany.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Suffrage committee that met a committee of Republicans at Republican headquarters, July 24th, to discuss suffrage question. Left to right: Miss Carolin Lexow, Mrs. John W. Brennan, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Miss Roberta Hill, Mrs. Raymond Brown, Mrs. Lillian Griffin, Mrs. Martha W. Suffern.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Prominent suffrage leaders attended the conference which was held at the home of Mrs. O. H. Belmont. The conference was called by Miss Alice Paul, Chairman of the National Women's Party. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss, in a preliminary way, the future of the party. The photo shows the prominent leaders who attended the conference. Left to right, front row: Miss Rhetta Childs Dorr, Miss Lucy Branham, Miss Florence Kelly, Miss Alice Paul, Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, Mrs. Abbey Scott Baker, Mrs. Annie G. Porrt, Mrs. John J. White, and Miss Elsie Hill.
Gallery of Harriot Blatch
Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch watching at the polls, New York.
View from above American suffragette leader Harriot Stanton Blatch voices her disapproval of anti-suffrage speaker Richard Barry outside the Lyceum Theatre, United States, circa 1915.
From left to right, Eleanor Irving, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Senator Stillwell, Mrs. Arthur Townsend, and Mrs. John Rogers Jnr after the Women's Suffrage Movement march to Albany.
Suffrage committee that met a committee of Republicans at Republican headquarters, July 24th, to discuss suffrage question. Left to right: Miss Carolin Lexow, Mrs. John W. Brennan, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Miss Roberta Hill, Mrs. Raymond Brown, Mrs. Lillian Griffin, Mrs. Martha W. Suffern.
Prominent suffrage leaders attended the conference which was held at the home of Mrs. O. H. Belmont. The conference was called by Miss Alice Paul, Chairman of the National Women's Party. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss, in a preliminary way, the future of the party. The photo shows the prominent leaders who attended the conference. Left to right, front row: Miss Rhetta Childs Dorr, Miss Lucy Branham, Miss Florence Kelly, Miss Alice Paul, Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, Mrs. Abbey Scott Baker, Mrs. Annie G. Porrt, Mrs. John J. White, and Miss Elsie Hill.
Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch
(Autobiography of the important second-generation suffragi...)
Autobiography of the important second-generation suffragist. In her foreword, the historian Mary Ritter Beard wrote, "Harriot Stanton Blatch, in my opinion, had the best mind among the acclaimed leaders of the woman suffrage movement from the death of her mother to its triumphant end in 1918. For the earlier intelligence, I would give the laurel to her mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but the daughter was a fine chip off the old block." Blatch's influence was greatest as president & strategist with the Women's Political Union. This volume provides a first-hand description of the struggle for women's rights. Published in celebration of Vassar College's 75th anniversary. Blatch ends her book by stating, "Women can save civilization only by the broadest cooperative action, by taking part in greater numbers in government, by daring to think, by daring to be themselves."
Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch was an American writer and social reformer. She helped to revolutionize and shape New York State's suffrage movement from a 19th-century movement of the upper class, white women to a modern 20th-century reform movement involving women from all classes and ethnic backgrounds, except African American women. During World War I Blatch was a director of the Woman's Land Army.
Background
Harriot Blatch was born on January 20, 1856, in Seneca Falls, New York, United States. She was the sixth of seven children (two girls and five boys) of Henry Brewster and Elizabeth (Cady) Stanton. Her mother was the instigator of the first woman's rights convention (1848), where she made the first public demand for woman suffrage. Her father, an eloquent advocate of political action against slavery, was an able lawyer, a state senator, and a journalist.
Blatch grew up in an atmosphere of discussion, in which individual opinions on public affairs were fearlessly expressed by her parents and their friends among the reformers. This developed in her independence of thought and facility of expression, an interest in politics, and zeal for equal rights.
Education
Harriot Blatch attended Presbyterian then Unitarian Sunday School. As a child, she enjoyed a rich education at a variety of private institutions. A bright student, especially in language arts, she "possessed," she recalled, "a knack of pronouncing correctly proper names and words I had never seen before and of whose meaning I had not the slightest idea." She initially had her sights set on Cornell University, but her aunt, Harriet Cady Eaton, who funded her education, sent her to Vassar in 1874. Harriot resented much of that experience, calling Vassar "a slough of despond" and characterizing it as "an institution composed entirely of a disfranchised class which was definitely discouraged by the authorities from taking any interest whatsoever in its own political freedom."
After graduating with honors from Vassar College in 1878, Harriot attended the Boston School of Oratory in 1879 and then traveled in Europe. For her investigation of English village life, she received a Master of Arts degree from Vassar in 1894.
Harriot Stanton Blatch's oratorical career proved short-lived, audiences comparing her skills to those of her mother, who always came out on top. Harriot's struggle to break from her mother's shadow was intensified by the pressure Stanton placed on her daughter to follow in her footsteps as an activist. It took Harriot years to find her own unique - and prominent - place within the women's rights movement.
In her search for an alternate vocation, Harriot approached her mother's mentor, the social reformer and editor William Lloyd Garrison. He advised her to "Seize the first bit of work that offers if it is honest and honorable. It will lead to something better." Following Garrison's recommendation, she accompanied two American girls on an extended trip to Germany as their paid companion and tutor in 1880. While Harriot welcomed a new adventure, her mother struggled with separation from her daughter, perhaps feeling remorse at her own preoccupation with work during much of Harriot's childhood. In "Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897," Stanton regretted "how much more I might have done for the perfect development of my children."
After two years, Harriot returned home in 1882 to nurse her ailing mother. Despite its unfortunate provocation, her return to America proved to be doubly auspicious.
In 1882 Blatch wrote, for Volume II of the monumental "History of Woman Suffrage" on which her mother and Susan B. Anthony were then engaged, the chapter (XXVI) on the American Woman Suffrage Association. For the next twenty years, Blatch lived in Basingstoke, England.
Partly for reasons of health, partly in order to give her daughter an American education, she and her husband moved to the United States in 1902. Blatch soon became active in the Women's Trade Union League and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Looking upon the methods of the older suffragists as academic and too involved in organizational detail, she enlisted the interest of an entirely new and younger group - women in the industry, trade unionists, and business and professional women - forming in New York in 1907 the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women.
During World War I, Harriot Stanton Blatch focused on mobilizing women in the Women's Land Army and other ways to support the war effort. In her book "Mobilizing Woman Power" (1918) she described the war work of women in Europe. In "A Woman's Point of View, Some Roads to Peace" (1920) she told of the effects of war on the peoples of Europe. This investigation led her to believe that the hope for peace among nations lay in votes for women and in women's participation in the League of Nations. She saw women's growing economic independence threatened by protective labor legislation based on sex and advocated instead adequate regulation of child labor, the prohibition of unhealthy, dangerous working conditions, and more women in labor unions.
She was active in the Progressive and Socialist parties and an unsuccessful candidate for public office. With her brother Theodore Stanton, she edited "Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences" (1922). Her memoirs, "Challenging Years," written in collaboration with Alma Lutz, were published in 1940.
Harriot Stanton Blatch was active in the woman suffrage movement and one of its most effective speakers. She was the leader of her thriving, militant organization, the Women's Political Union. Under her leadership, young women held the first open-air meetings, stationed women watchers at the polls, and initiated the first woman suffrage parade, which marched down Fifth Avenue in 1910, an innovation which older, more conservative suffragists prophesied would set the movement back fifty years.
After the Stanton family moved to New York City in 1862, Harriot found a home she "thoroughly enjoyed" in the church school of Unitarian Octavius Brooks Frothingham, where the Bible was introduced as "partly the history and partly the myths of a primitive people."
Politics
Blatch at once took an interest in politics, showing marked Liberal and Labor sympathies and serving on the executive committees of the Women's Local Government Society, the Women's Liberal Federation, and the Fabian Society, in which she was associated with Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ramsay MacDonald, and George Bernard Shaw. She declined, however, to run for the London School Board, despite the urging of friends, for though she had legally lost her American citizenship by marriage, she regarded this as gross injustice and refused to consider herself a British subject. She subsequently regained her American citizenship through naturalization.
In 1910 Blatch changed the name of her thriving, militant organization to the Women's Political Union, and in 1916, in order to work more effectively for the federal woman suffrage amendment, she merged it with the Congressional Union, later the National Woman's Party.
Blatch continued her political work on behalf of workers joining the Socialist Party because it was the only party that "aimed to raise the standard of living of the average citizen." She advocated motherhood endowments and pensions to create economic independence valuing the work of mothers.
Views
Harriot advocated achieving economic independence for women, a goal she believed that the confining institution of motherhood hindered. She saw a solution in universal motherhood endowments, which, by compensating mothers for the care of their own children, liberated women from economic dependence on their husbands. She also became the first woman to publicly denounce proposed workplace legislation that threatened to impose on women such restrictions as maximum work hours and limitations to certain occupations.
Quotations:
"We are asking to be voters, and the practical thing to do is to act like voters."
"Women can save civilization only by the broadest cooperative action, by taking part in greater numbers in government, by daring to think, by daring to be themselves. The world is calling for women of vision and courage. May the women of the world hear the call and go forward!"
"Perhaps someday men will raise a tablet reading in letters of gold: 'All honor to women, the first disenfranchised class in history who, unaided by any political party, won enfranchisement by its own effort... and achieved the victory without the shedding of a drop of human blood. All honor to women of the world!"
"Unpaid work never commands respect; it is the paid worker who has brought to the public mind conviction of woman's worth."
"If all men labored hard every hour of the twenty-four, they could not do all the work of the world."
"My opposition to the war was not because of the horrors of war, not because war demands that the race offer up its very best in their full vigor, not because war means economic bankruptcy, the domination of races by famine and disease, but because war is so completely ineffective, so stupid. It settles nothing."
Membership
In England, Harriot Stanton Blatch joined the Fabian Society and noted the work of the Women's Franchise League. She also was active in the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
Fabian Society
,
United Kingdom
Women's Franchise League
,
United Kingdom
Women's Trade Union League
,
United States
National American Woman Suffrage Association
,
United States
Women's Political Union
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Harriot Blatch was handsome, dynamic, keen, fearless, and a brilliant orator.
Connections
On November 15, 1882, Harriot married William Henry Blatch, an English businessman. Throughout her adolescence and early adulthood, she had entertained concerns about marriage, fearing confinement to domestic life. William, however, devoted himself to Harriot’s success outside the home. He had few social activities or involvement in political reform and remained content to simply support his wife's career. Settled in England, Harriot gave birth to their first child, Nora Stanton Blatch, in September of 1883. Their second child was Helen Stanton, who died tragically of whooping cough at age four.
Father:
Henry Brewster Stanton
Stanton was well known as an orator and writer and used these skills as a journalist, attorney, and politician.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American suffragist, social activist, and abolitionist. Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1892 until 1900.
Brother:
Daniel Cady Stanton
Brother:
Henry Brewster Stanton, Jr.
Brother:
Gerrit Smith Stanton
Brother:
Theodore Weld Stanton
Sister:
Margaret Livingston Stanton Lawrence
Brother:
Robert Livingston Stanton
husband:
William Henry Blatch
Daughter:
Helen Stanton Blatch
Daughter:
Nora Stanton Blatch
Nora Stanton Blatch Barney was an English-born United States civil engineer, architect, and suffragist. Barney was among the first women to graduate with an engineering degree in the United States. Given an ultimatum to either stay a wife or practice engineering she chose engineering.
