LETTER: Autograph letter signed, Aug. 26, 1900 to E. Cady Stanton's daughter Harriot.
From A Founder To A Founder’s Daughter
Anthony, Susan B. Autograph letter signed “Susan B. Anthony,” to Harriet Stanton Blatch, Rochester, August 26, 1900.
One leaf of National American Woman Suffrage Association, Office Honorary President letterhead; folded for mailing; else fine. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Harriet Stanton Blatch was one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton‘s seven children, and followed in her mother’s strong political wake by organizing the Political Equality League of Self Supporting Women, or the Women’s Political Union, a notable suffrage society founded in 1906 in New York that championed the rights of working women. Under Stanton Blatch’s leadership, the WPU was host to the first suffrage meeting in Carnegie Hall and was the organizer of the first suffrage foot parade in New York. The Union also adopted an innovative process of interviewing candidates for political office and pledged them to vote for the submission of a suffrage amendment to state electors.
In 1915, however, the WPU abandoned state political work to focus its efforts on amending the Federal Constitution to grant women the right to vote. A year later Stanton Blatch was elected to serve on the executive committee of the National Woman’s Party, a vocal suffrage organization founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in 1916 that employed radical campaign tactics, such as parades, speeches, watch fires and demonstrations to attract attention. They also followed the British “Suffragette” strategy of holding the entire party responsible for its leaders’ failure to adopt a woman’s suffrage amendment. The NWP was viewed as the most persuasive of all the suffrage organizations in amending the constitution to include women’s vote.
Anthony’s letter, written sixteen years before Stanton Blatch’s involvement in the NWP, posed this modest, yet pertinent and portentous, question:
Do you not think it is time to turn the thoughts of [] to a Constitutional Amendment?—1914 [ ]—it is little enough time to work for that matter it seems to me—there will be a completely new set of men to work with, and whom by that time—I think all the fooling with tax suffrage is time thrown away—I wish I could see you and chat with you. Affectionately yours, Susan B. Anthony.
(#4319)
Print Inquire
