Book Review

In this meticulously researched and tremendously engaging biography, Ellen DuBois continues her career-long evaluation of the significance of the woman suffrage campaign to the emancipation of American women. Here, she shifts her focus from the creation of the movement in the mid-nineteenth century--the subject of her classic 1978 study, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)--to its revitalization in the early twentieth century. This revitalization she credits largely to her subject, Harriot Stanton Blatch. DuBois argues that like her mother, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Blatch offered women a broad vision of feminist activism, one that, like Blatch herself, is today largely forgotten. Recovering that vision, this important new study is both a biography and a reinterpretation of feminism in the early twentieth century.	1
The first third of the book treats Harriot's childhood and personal development. DuBois attempts to understand what it meant for Harriot to grow up as the nation's first second-generation feminist. DuBois is only able to surmise, however. Inheriting her mother's fierce sense of privacy and overriding political instinct, Harriot learned at a young age to subsume "the personal dimension in the political" (9). As a result, the private Harriot remains elusive. It is nevertheless evident that Elizabeth was the dominant force in Harriot's life and that the two enjoyed a tender and enduring relationship. The other formative experience of Harriot's life was her engagement with Fabian socialism. Shortly after graduating from Vassar in 1878, Harriot traveled to Europe, where she married an upper-class English businessman and remained for two decades. There, Harriot moved in the inner circle of the Fabian Society and learned to rethink "the tasks of suffragism with a new level of attention to the realities of class." She began to understand that elite women had "at least as much to learn from as to teach women of the working classes" (61). This, DuBois argues, distinguished Blatch's vision from her mother's and would undergird Blatch's unique contribution to American feminism.	2
Upon Stanton's death in 1902, Blatch (aged forty-six) relocated her husband and child to New York City and spent the rest of her life "vindicating, enhancing, and transforming the past her mother had laid down for American suffragism" (12). The story of her suffrage career fills the second two thirds of the book. DuBois credits Blatch both with spearheading the "modernization" of the American suffrage campaign and with offering women a more constructive "third way" to the split between "equality" and "difference" that weakened feminism after 1920.	3
DuBois argues that Blatch was critical to reviving the flagging American suffrage movement in two ways: First, by recognizing the need to include working-class women as participants and even leaders, and second, by putting politics at its center. Readers may question the first claim. Although Blatch may have fostered cross-class coalition through her work with the Women's Trade Union League and through her own organization, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, when meaningful collaboration between working-class women and elite women collapsed in the New York City shirtwaist strike of 1909, Blatch sided with the elite women in accepting a settlement against strikers' wishes. On the other hand, Blatch's pivotal role in carrying the movement into legislative politics is undeniable. After 1910 her Women's Political Union (the successor to the Equality League after Blatch apparently abandoned cross-class organizing) became arguably the most influential suffrage group in the nation, spearheading the New York suffrage referendum of 1915 and popularizing new political tactics, like open-air meetings and suffrage parades.	4
Blatch's influence steadily declined after 1915 and so, too, DuBois argues, did the truly emancipatory possibilities of the suffrage movement. Her ferocious independence and intellectual arrogance marginalized Blatch. At the same time, the failure of leaders to grapple with class politics left her disinterested in the campaign. Losing power in New York to Carrie Chapman Catt (whom she despised), Blatch worked intermittently with Alice Paul, merging her Women's Political Union into Paul's Congressional Union. But Blatch found both Catt and Paul too single-minded about the vote, and between 1917 and 1920, she paid little attention to the campaign, shifting her energies elsewhere. When the suffrage movement divided into camps of "equality" (removal of all sex-based legal distinctions) and "difference" (expansion of protective legislation for women) after winning the vote, Harriot articulated a third path: "constructive" feminism. This view had women's economic equality at its center and was, DuBois contends, more visionary and radical than either "equality" or "difference." It appears, however, that what DuBois finds in Blatch's thought, contemporaries did not. Blatch apparently found no constituency for her views, and her purported radicalism drew no right-wing fire during the mid-1920s when other feminists suffered vicious attacks. Indeed, DuBois finds that Blatch's F.B.I. File labeled her conservative. Still, DuBois argues that scholars' failure to recognize Blatch's alternative vision means that we have misunderstood the content and potential of feminism after 1920.	5
Blatch spent the last decades of her life (1920–1940) Fighting to restore her mother, and by extension herself, to our historical memory. In a fascinating final chapter, DuBois explores the process by which Stanton and Blatch were written out of conventional narratives. As feminists vied for control of the movement after the passage of the nineteenth amendment, they used history to advance their claims, writing participant accounts of the long campaign that glorified themselves and marginalized Stanton and Blatch. Blatch countered, but she was never able to correct the record. With this important new biography, DuBois sets out to do what Blatch could not: convince future generations of Blatch's significance as a strategist and philosopher. In the process, DuBois challenges us to rethink the long campaign for women's emancipation, insisting upon the centrality of economics and working-class politics to any understanding of the movement. DuBois's study appears amidst a boom in suffrage scholarship, and readers will find in it some of the best new work in the field.	6
Lisa Tetrault University of Wisconsin-Madison

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