Blatch, Harriet Stanton (Harriet Eaton Stanton Blatch), 1856–1940, American labor reformer and woman suffrage leader, b. Seneca Falls, N.Y. A daughter of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton, she assisted her mother and Susan B. Anthony with the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922), writing a chapter on Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association, a rival group to Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association. After marrying (1882) the Englishman William H. Blatch, she moved to England, where she was involved in the reform movement, including the Fabian Society.
Returning to the United States in 1902, she became active in the woman suffrage movement and founded (1907) the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (from 1910 the Women's Political Union; WPU), which sought support among working-class women and trade unionists. Following the defeat of the 1915 Woman Suffrage campaign, the WPU merged (1916) into the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (later the National Woman's party). Blatch was instrumental in passage of the 19th amendment (1920), giving women the right to vote. She wrote Mobilizing Woman Power (1918), A Woman's Point of View (1920), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences (ed. with T. Stanton, 1922).
See her autobiography (with A. Lutz, 1940); E. C. DuBois, Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: U.S. History: Biographies
