Harriot Stanton Blatch

Harriot Stanton Blatch was in many ways born to be a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage. Her father, Henry Stanton, was active in the abolitionist movement. Her mother was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a cofounder of the National Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). But the new organization was plagued with rivalries. Harriot Stanton Blatch grew restless of the internal politics so she formed her own group, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. In 1910, she changed her organization’s name to the Women’s Political Union (WPU). With the WPU, Blatch embarked on reinvigorating the suffrage movement with open-air meetings and a mass suffrage parade in New York City in 1910. She also believed that...