Harriot Stanton Blatch

Born in 1856, she was the daughter of major reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Henry B. Stanton, but she built a public career of her own rather than simply inheriting a cause. After spending years in England, she returned to the United States and became an energetic organizer in the American suffrage movement.

She is especially remembered for founding the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later called the Women’s Political Union, in New York City. Through that work, she sought to bring wage-earning and immigrant women into a movement that had often been led mainly by middle-class reformers, helping give suffrage activism a more visible, modern, street-level style.

She also wrote about women’s rights and political change, including the book Mobilizing Woman-Power. Remembered today as both an organizer and a writer, she played an important part in widening the reach of the campaign that eventually won American women the vote.