Harriot who?

January 20...

Today's the birthday of author and suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch.

Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch (January 20, 1856 – November 20, 1940) was practically destined to become an activist. Her father, Henry B. Stanton, was an abolitionist, politician and journalist. And her mother was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the leader of the women's rights movement.

After college, she assisted her mother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Susan B. Anthony in completing their comprehensive 'History of Woman Suffrage,' writing a hundred-page chapter on Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), the rival organization to the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) run by her mother and Anthony. In fact, it was her contribution that helped to reconcile to the two organizations, eventually merging into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

In 1882, she married William Blatch, an Englishman, and they moved to England where she spent the next 20 years moving in British reform circles, and completed a statistical study of rural English women women's conditions.

In 1902, they returned to the US where she quickly became involved in the Women's Trade Union League as well as joining the suffrage movement. She was disappointed with the quality of suffrage work from NAWSA, finding it too apathetic, too conservative, and too much concerned with internal affairs and affluent supporters.

So in 1907 she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, reaching out to working women who had never really been considered for suffrage work. She used this connection to trade-unions to bring in a new sense of vitality to the movement, and in 1910 the league's name was changed to the Women's Political Union. She introduced her "open air tactics" with suffrage parades and by sending women into public to address men in fiery speeches.

During WWI, she devoted her time to the war effort, heading the Women's Land Army of America, which trained women to work on farms to replace men sent to the battlefront, to ensure crops could be planted and harvested to continuing feeding the nation as well as the troops.

From National Women's History Alliance on FB, Jan 20, 2022