Harriot Stanton Blatch
Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940) was a leader in the woman suffrage
movement, a writer and an advocate for labor reform. She is credited
with modernizing a suffrage movement that, by the opening of the 20th
century, was listless and flagging. The combination of her energy,
daring and political savvy spurred the movement on to its goal of
enfranchising American women with the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.
The sixth child of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot was raised in
a family where every member was expected to have an opinion and to
voice it and was trained in politics and social activism. 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." From her mother Harriot
inherited a religion that combined scientific rationality and reform
activism. She found this "sacred humanity" view too individualistic,
however; hers was a more communal view, seeing society as an integrated
whole.
Her greatest inspiration and spiritual comfort came from the
beauties of nature. She felt that even the experience of transcendence
was something to be studied as she analyzed the "soul impression" made
by sun flickering on the trees outside Paris. But in her work we see
more of her mother's religion of humanity than of this young woman who
drank inspiration from sunlight and mountain peaks.
In 1882 she married English businessman, William Henry Blatch.
For Harriot, the sacrament of marriage came not from divine blessing but
from "the real aspirations of living men and women." In a forthright
statement of religious belief, she wrote, "On my wedding day of all
days, I feel I must be wholly true, and would I be that if I invoked the
blessings of a Being in whom I have no belief?"
Harriot Blatch spent the first twenty years of her marriage in
Basingstoke, England, where she became involved with the English
suffrage movement and Fabian socialism. Harriot protested that by virtue
of her marriage she had become a citizen of England without her
consent. She always felt like an American in her heart, and forewent
swearing allegiance to Queen Victoria, a move that kept her from holding
political office. She did, however, hold leadership positions in
suffrage societies, the Woman's Local Government Society, the Women's
Liberal Federation and the Fabian Society.
In 1894 she was granted a Master of Arts degree by Vassar for
her study of England's rural poor. In 1902 Blatch returned to the United
States, where her work for women's rights would reach its greatest
heights. Confident that people are moved more by emotion than by logic,
she set about revitalizing a movement that "bored its adherents and
repelled its opponents." In January 1907 she became a founder and first
president of the Equality League of Self- Supporting Women, later called
the Women's Political Union, and organized a campaign of publicity,
education and civil action.
Although more conservative suffrage workers were shocked by her
tactics, Blatch instituted open-air meetings, spreading the message of
enfranchisement on street corners and in parks and, once, even in a
cemetery. Starting in 1908 she organized mass meetings at Cooper Union
and annual Suffrage Day parades in New York. For the 1912 parade, the
New York Tribune reported 20,000 marchers and 80,000 spectators. Blatch
combined these tactics of civil protest with political action. She was
determined that only through political channels would the dream of
suffrage be realized. Seeing working-class women more as exemplars for
others than as "victims to be succored," Blatch brought working women to
Albany to argue their own case. At a 1907 hearing in Albany, union
workers spoke so eloquently that an antisuffrage debater relinquished
her rebuttal time saying, "I have been given today much to think about. I
am not convinced, but I am silenced."
The New York suffrage amendment of 1915, championed by Blatch,
was defeated, but a similar amendment was passed in 1917. Blatch moved
to the national scene. From her Grandma Cady, she had learned to mold
people and circumstance. During a visit from suffragist Anne
Cobden-Sanderson, well-known in England but unknown in America, Blatch
casually informed an immigration official of Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson's
prison record. His efforts to block the well-connected suffragist's
immigration created all the publicity Blatch wanted.
During the Republican parade preceding the 1908 election,
Blatch stationed the exquisite Inez Milholland in a storefront window
along the parade route. Distracted by this striking beauty, the young
male marchers broke ranks, and "the young Republicans were persuaded to
withdraw and console themselves with suffrage literature." In another
political move Blatch took advantage of voting laws that stated that
anyone could be a poll watcher and placed suffragists as watchers in the
all-male polling places. On
August 26, 1920, all of Blatch's manipulations and political
maneuvering, humorous and serious, bore fruit in ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment.
In 1920 she published her second book, A Woman's Point of
View, Some Roads to Peace. She wrote: "My opposition to 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, domination of races by famine and disease, but
because war is so completely ineffective, so stupid. It settles
nothing." 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.“
Footnote: This column is based on existing materials on the
internet, partially the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist
Biography and is so credited.
Click on John I. Blair
for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online.
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