Basic Information

Harriot Stanton Blatch was born January 20, 1856 in Seneca Falls, NY to abolitionist Henry Stanton and famed political feminist and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She is most well-known for her contributions to women’s labor rights within the woman suffrage movement in the United States and England, authoring works on the movement, and is noted for being a pioneer of guerrilla suffrage parades and open-air meetings.

Background Information

Blatch was one of 7 children born to the Stanton family. Proudly taking after her mother, she showed an early passion for the woman’s suffrage movement, albeit with much different tactics. Favoring the militant style she learned while working with British suffragettes, she brought these new and different strategies to the U.S. movement.

After college, Blatch worked for a short time with her mother and Susan B. Anthony, contributing to their publication. Her activism led her to international travel, where she met her husband, wealthy English businessman William Harry Blatch Jr. They married in 1882 and lived in England together for nearly twenty years (Britannica, 2020). They had two children– one tragically died at age 4 and the other, a daughter named Nora, went on to become the first female civil engineer graduate in the United States. After the death of her husband, Blatch permanently found her way back to the states.

Outside of her activism, little is known about Blatch’s private life. Even in her own autobiography she speaks very little on personal matters. Some researchers believe that her suffrage crusade was the most important thing in her life and that her ego may have caused a major division in her personal and public life, so when she died on November 20, 1940 at age 84, she was “alone and blind in a nursing home, where her daughter rarely visited” (Eckhaus, 1997).

Contributions to the First Wave

In 1878 Blatch graduated from Vassar College. Curious about the woman suffrage movement in other countries, she spent the 2 years following college travelling through Europe until returning home to work with her mother and Susan B. Anthony on their publication, History of Woman Suffrage. Blatch offered 100 pages on Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association in her first published works for the suffrage movement (Britannica, 2020).

After writing and lecturing with her mother for some time, Blatch again travelled to England to blaze her own trail and learn more from international women’s rights groups. Marrying into an elite English family, Blatch and her husband called London home for nearly two decades. There she became involved with the Fabian Society, Women’s Local Government Society and Women’s Franchise League while also learning militant activism tactics from British suffragettes. (Eckhaus, 1997). Though her family was based in London, she often travelled back to the states for extended visits, including to earn her M.A. from Vassar in 1894 through her studies on English women’s labor conditions.

Blatch moved her family back to the United States for good in 1902 to bring her labor rights knowledge and vigor to the stalled-out New York suffrage movement. From 1905–1909 she was an elite member of the Executive Council of the New York Women’s Trade Union League, often filling in for President Mary Dreier (DuBois, 1987, p 46). She also reunited with her mother’s longtime friend Susan B. Anthony upon her return, in the now merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). This relationship didn’t last long, as Blatch quickly grew bored of the elitism in the NAWSA, and in 1907 founded her own group, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (Eckhaus, 1997).

With her new group, Blatch had complete autonomy and her main goal was “to unite women of all classes” (Wheeler, 1995, p 15). She recruited working-class women who wanted to participate in her militant style of activism, and it was here that Blatch introduced members to a new tactic– open-air meetings. Although they weren’t always met with acceptance from the crowds they drew, Blatch held “that the first function of militant tactics was to gain much-needed publicity for the movement” (DuBois, 1987, p 55).

In 1910, after so much success with the open-air meetings, Blatch helped organize the first official Suffrage Parade in New York City. A group of 3,000 nervous women took to Fifth Avenue behind the shield of automobiles, as they feared repercussions for their march. Instead, the parade had a different effect– it managed to strike fear in Americans at the thought of a domestic army of women (DuBois, 1987). By 1912 the annual Suffrage Parade grew to 20,000 women strong with over 80,000 people coming to watch.

In 1917 America joined the first World War. As men were being drafted overseas to fight for their country, the U.S. struggled with how to sustained the country with things like agricultural work. Because of this crisis and Blatch’s strong speaking abilities and international connections, Herbert Hoover appointed her head of the Food Administration of Speakers (Gowdy-Wygant, 2013, p 43-44). The goal of FAS was to keep food on the tables of Americans despite losing the farmers that sustained them to the war efforts. Blatch recommended training women to take over agricultural roles, and although she was turned down by Hoover’s administration, she pushed forward to eventually bring the Women’s Land Army to America.

This led to her being named Director of the Women’s Land Army of America, where she helped recruit, organize and train WLAA women to take over agricultural work. In 1918 she wrote her first book about the contributions of women during the war called Mobilizing Woman-Power and dedicated it “the women of Great Britain and France, realizing the importance of using foreign examples and ideas to encourage the American people to make the best use of their female workforce” (Gowdy-Wygant, 2013, p 6).

Although Blatch spent most of her activism career arguing “that women of all classes or positions in society should have as equal an opportunity as men to create lasting career opportunities” (Gowdy-Wygant, 2013, p 23), she struggled at times to do what was best for the working women she was fighting for. In one case, while working with the Women’s Trade Union League, she voted against a worker’s strike that took away their right to organize, causing a permanent rift with the shirtwaist workers it affected.

Her confliction was most likely rooted in her overwhelming desire for notoriety and commendation that clouded her vision. Her choices often reflected what would get her more attention instead of the most impactful decisions for working women. Perhaps the most negative aspect of working with Blatch was “the amount of time she wasted jockeying for position, vehemently attacking those…who shared her goals but not her tactics” (Eckhaus, 1997). By creating divisions within the movement, she alienated herself from much of the praise she would have received by working in a more inclusive manner.

Around 1930 Blatch suffered a hip injury that landed her in a nursing home and took her out of her activism career. Her relationships with family and friends had suffered as well due to her ego, and she spent much of her last years alone in the nursing home. In the last year of her life she worked with Alma Lutz to write her own autobiography, Challenging Years (1940). Shortly after publication Harriot Stanton Blatch died (Britannica, 2020).

“Society has taught women self-sacrifice and now this force is to be drawn upon in the arduous campaign for their own emancipation.”
– Harriot Stanton Blatch (DuBois, 1987)

Analysis and Conclusion

While Blatch’s beliefs about uniting women of all classes in the suffrage movement through militant and abrasive tactics was certainly not embraced by all, there is no denying she made way for a lot of progress and ignited a passion in women of all class levels. She was known for her egotism and difficulty to work with, but she was also motivated, innovative and zealous about suffrage and equal labor issues for all women. This is evident in her contributions to the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA), the International Council of Women (ICW), National Women’s Party, Food Administration Speaker’s Bureau, The Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, Women’s Political Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Congressional Union, and all the British organizations she trained with. Harriot Stanton Blatch, in all her arrogance, was an absolute force to be reckoned with and an enormous contributor to the women’s rights movement.

References

DuBois, E. C. (1987). Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894-1909. Journal of American History, 74(1), 34–58. https://doi-org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/10.2307/1908504

Eckhaus, P. (1997, December 29). Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage. The Nation, 265(22), 27+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20175739/AONE?u=wash_main&sid=AONE&xid=f0f196fd

Gowdy-Wygant, C. (2013). Cultivating Victory: The Women’s Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch. (2020, January 16). Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriot-Eaton-Stanton-Blatch

(Image) Harriot Stanton Blatch, half-length portrait, seated, facing slightly right, writing. None. [Between 1905 and 1917] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/96509180/.

James D. Hart ; Phillip W. Leininger. (1995). Blatch, Harriet Stanton (1856–1940). The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 1995-01-01.

Wheeler, M. S. (Ed.). (1995). One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the woman suffrage movement. Troutdale, OR: Newsage PR.