Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–1940)

Harriot Eaton Stanton came to her women's rights activism naturally, born in Seneca Falls to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry Stanton. Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were family friends. Harriot attended several private schools and studied mathematics at Vassar College. After graduation, she joined the women's suffrage movement and worked with her mother and Susan B. Anthony on the second volume of History of Woman Suffrage (1881). In 1882, she married William Blatch, a British businessman, and went to live in England. There she became involved in the Fabian Society and was a leader in the struggle for votes for women with Emmeline Pankhurst. In 1902, she returned to the USA and founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later called the Women’s Political Union. She organized and led the first mass parades for women’s suffrage in New York starting in 1908, and published her first book, Mobilizing Woman-Power, in 1918. During World War I, she supported the war effort but afterwards became a pacifist, encouraging women to help prevent new military conflicts in the book A Woman's Point of View: Some Roads to Peace (1920). She made an unsuccessful bid for comptroller of New York City in 1921 on the Socialist Party ticket, and five years later, ran for the Senate as the Socialist Party candidate. Later she worked on behalf of the League of Nations. She wrote a biography of her mother, and her own memoirs, Challenging Years: the Memoirs of Harriet Stanton Blatch, published in 1940. Her daughter Nora Stanton Blatch Barney became the first woman to hold a graduate degree in civil engineering.