Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch - Biography

Biography

Harriot Eaton Stanton was born in Seneca Falls, New York, to social activists Henry Brewster Stanton and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the sixth of seven children. She attended Vassar College, where she graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1878. She attended the Boston School for Oratory for a year, and then spent most of 1880-1881 in Germany as a tutor for young girls. On her return voyage to the United States, she met English businessman William Henry Blatch, Jr., who went by the name of Harry. Blatch and Harriot Stanton were married in 1882, and lived outside of London for twenty years. They had two daughters, the second of whom died at age four. Their first daughter, Nora Stanton Blatch Barney, continued the family tradition as a suffragist, was the first American woman to earn a degree in civil engineering, and was briefly married to Lee De Forest. Harry Blatch died in 1915, after being accidentally electrocuted.

In 1881, Harriot Stanton worked with her mother and Susan B. Anthony on the History of Woman Suffrage. She contributed a major chapter to the second volume, in which she included the history of the American Woman Suffrage Association, a rival of Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association. This action would help to reconcile the two organizations.

While in England, she performed a statistical study of rural English working women's conditions, for which she received her M.A. from Vassar. She also worked with English social reform groups, including the Women's Local Government Society, the Fabian Society, and the Women's Franchise League. In the Women's Franchise League, she developed organizing techniques that she would later use in America.