Harriot Stanton Blatch
Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–1940)
Harriot Stanton Blatch was a writer and advocate for labor reform. She is also credited with modernizing the woman's suffrage movement. By the opening of the 20th century, the movement was listless and flagging. Blatch's radical style combined militant civil disobedience with political activism.
Blatch published her first book, Mobilizing Woman Power, in 1918. The book offered a feminist view in favor of war since it provided equality of work for women. However, after witnessing a war-ravaged Europe, Blatch turned her efforts to the peace movement. In 1920, she published her second book, A Woman's Point of View, Some Roads to Peace.
In her second work, Blatch wrote:
"My opposition to war was not because of the horrors of war, not because war demands that the race offer up its very best in their full vigor, not because war means economic bankruptcy, domination of races by famine and disease, but because war is so completely ineffective, so stupid. It settles nothing."
Featured here are photographs and an excerpt from her first publication: Blatch, Harriot Stanton. Mobilizing Woman-power / with a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt. New York: The Womans Press, 1918. SpC. 940.3082 B644m1918
