Reinventing Woman Suffrage

Historians of women have been slow to exploit the potential richness of the suffrage movement as a research topic, daunted perhaps by its scale and duration. Two generations of women produced 480 campaigns in state legislatures, 277 campaigns in state party conventions, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive congresses in addition to the ratification campaign of 1919–1920. ¹ Until recently historians have left the field to three classic studies, The History of Woman Suffrage, 6 volumes compiled by suffrage leaders (1881–1922); Eleanor Flexner’s magisterial Century of Struggle: History of Women’s Rights in the United States (1959); and Aileen Kraditor’s “revisionist” Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965).

Recent writings on the movement have begun to break new ground, however, not only by pursuing local case studies, but by posing questions that connect woman suffrage with other topics in women’s history and American history—race relations during the Jim Crow era, for example, or partisan politics in the Gilded Age. ²

Focusing on class relations in the Progressive era, Ellen DuBois’s important new book, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, adds substantially to this growing literature. Since the publication of her first book, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978), DuBois has been the chief exception to our scholarly avoidance of the suffrage movement. Now she embodies the field’s robust monographic growth.

Centering her study on one of the most vibrant suffrage leaders, Harriot Stanton Blatch, who, (not incidentally) was a daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, DuBois convincingly demonstrates Blatch’s importance as an institutional innovator of cross-class coalitions that built a working-class constituency for suffrage. Through show-business gimmicks Blatch also sold the movement to a wider public. By telling Blatch’s story DuBois puts flesh and bones on our heretofore abstract understanding of how suffrage was achieved. Showing us how the suffrage movement became part of labor history, reform history, and class relations in the Progressive era, she has given us a new more inclusive model for writing on those topics.

As a biography the book also has much to offer. We follow Harriot Blatch’s development as a person and an activist through four action-packed decades that bring her into contact with some of the era’s leading social reformers. Ultimately, however, the book is more successful as a study of the suffrage movement than as a biography. Blatch’s life contained sudden shifts that the author only partially explains, and we are left guessing about the larger pattern of disconnections within her activism. Nevertheless, the book is rewarding reading on many counts. Its central chapters on the New York suffrage movement show us the remarkable range and diversity of that movement at a moment of transforming change in its style and constituencies.

Harriot Stanton Blatch joined that movement after residing in England for twenty years. Graduating from Vassar in 1878, Blatch married an Englishman, largely, it seems, to escape her mother’s long shadow. In England in the 1890s Harriot became an active member of the Women’s Local Government Society, worked with the Women’s Franchise League, affiliated with Fabian socialism, and developed an interest in “the industrial question” and a commitment to working-class women. In a dramatic public letter to her mother in 1894, she declared, “Every workingman needs the suffrage more than I do, but there is another who needs it more than he does, just because [her] conditions are more galling, and that is the working woman” (p. 73). Blatch and her family returned permanently to the United States around the time of her mother’s death in 1902, and Harriot began to build a series of innovative suffrage organizations.

The first of these, the Equal Suffrage League of New York, found no constituency, but between 1907 and 1909 Blatch’s Equality League of Self Supporting Women did much to...