One of the most important suffragists of her generation, Harriot Stanton was born in 1856, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of the women’s rights movement in the United States, and Henry B. Stanton, an abolitionist. Harriot Stanton attended Vassar College, where she eventually earned a master’s degree in 1894. Throughout her life, Harriot remained close to her mother, whom she aided in the writing of History of Woman Suffrage.
In 1882, Harriot Stanton married Harry Blatch, a British citizen, and moved to Britain, where she became active in the suffrage campaign. It was there that Blatch witnessed the militant tactics of British suffrage activists and interacted with prominent British socialists. By the turn of the century, Harriot was dividing her time between Britain and the United States. She returned to the United States full-time in 1902, when she began campaigning for WOMAN SUFFRAGE in New York State. New York was both symbolically and politically important for Blatch and other suffragists. The movement, however, appeared to be stalling under the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Harriot Blatch injected new momentum into the state and national campaigns for female suffrage. As an activist with the National Women’s Trade Union League, she had gained some experience with working-class women. In 1907, she cofounded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, an organization dedicated to recruiting working-class women’s support for suffrage. The Equality League changed its name to the Women’s Political Union and later merged with the Congressional Union, which became the National Woman’s Party in 1916. In addition to broadening the support base for female suffrage, Blatch employed dramatic tactics borrowed from British suffragists. Mass marches, including one down Fifth Avenue, as well as a trolley-car campaign through New York’s towns and cities, helped publicize female suffrage and catapult it onto the national political agenda.
When her husband died in 1915, Blatch returned to Britain. She came back to the United States in 1917 and worked for the Food Administration. After the war and the successful suffrage campaign, Blatch remained active in the women’s and socialist movements. As an activist with the National Woman’s Party, she worked for a federal equal rights amendment. Throughout her career, Blatch wrote several books, including Mobilizing Woman Power (1920) and A Woman’s Point of View, Some Roads to Peace (1920). She died in Connecticut in 1940.
Harriot Stanton Blatch’s greatest contributions revolved around her intellectual and tactical innovations for the female suffrage campaigns. Adopting radical methods and broadening the class base of the movement helped raise political awareness among women themselves and among the nation’s political elite, eventually leading to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment for woman suffrage. In addition, her intellectual work on the history of the women’s movement, such as the 1922 volume she published with her brother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, set the stage for future women’s historians not only to investigate women’s history but also to trace women’s historiography.
See also women’s status and rights.
Further reading: Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
—Natalie Atkin
Blues
The origins of the musical genre of the blues are not well-documented, but its roots can be traced back to the African continent. Much of its foundation is in 16th-century African music. But while its roots can be traced back to Africa, the blues is not an African form of music. Its African origins were augmented by work and gospel songs, folk music, minstrel shows, and other musical forms. These influences combined to create what became a uniquely American style of music. In addition to its musical origins, there were other forces that helped to mold what is now considered the blues from its origins in the post-Civil War South.
Rural blues developed remarkably different identities in different regions. The blues that developed in the southern coastal states differed greatly from the style that developed in Texas. The blues that developed in Texas was very different from that of the Mississippi Delta. Each region had its own flavor. The southern coastal blues was noted most for its steady rhythm and clear enunciation. Blind Boy Fuller was one of the many blues singers who came to represent this unique form of entertainment. Texas blues was characterized by single-string picked arpeggios—not the strummed chords that characterized the blues of other regions. Blind Lemon Jefferson came to symbolize the Texas blues musician. The blues that developed in Mississippi became the most influential of the three forms. The slide, or bottleneck, guitar came to symbolize this blues style. Charley Patton was the earliest blues man to bring the blues style out of the Delta.
World War I and the accompanying Great Migration transformed the blues. These events caused tremendous demographic shifts that allowed the blues as a musical form to spread to other parts of the country. The rural undertones of the blues artists were adapted by men and women with urban experiences. They revolutionized not only the blues but also American music and culture. Atlanta, St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, and Chicago all proved to be fertile soil for the growth and development of urban blues. Chicago was by far the most important city in the development of urban blues, and it became synonymous with them. Chicago blues stands apart from other forms in its emotional structure. Paramount Records in Chicago began producing blues recordings in the late 1920s. With a gigantic mail-order business in the South, Paramount was successful in promoting and distributing Chicago blues until it succumbed to the economic hardships of the Great Depression. Even after Paramount had closed its doors, blues musicians continued to develop music in Chicago.
The effect that the blues has had on the development of American music is incalculable. The rhythms, beats, and lyrical styling of blues spread across America and to the rest of the world. The influence that the blues has had on jazz, soul, and rhythm-and-blues is clear. Less evident, but equally true, is the effect that the blues had on rock and roll, rap, and other popular forms of entertainment. It was truly an American art form.
Further reading: Lawrence Cohn, Nothing but the Blues: The Music and Musicians (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993); Austin J. Sonnier, A Guide to the Blues: History, Who’s Who, Research Sources (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994).
—Steve Freund
Boas, Franz Uri (1858-1942) anthropologist, linguist, museum curator
Anthropologist Franz Boas played a significant role in redefining race in America. He did this by moving the discussion of race away from Social Darwinism and toward an emphasis on individual cultures. By emphasizing the importance of each culture’s values, Boas convinced many in the scientific community and in America in general that racial differences were due not to hereditary differences but to culture. Through his pathbreaking studies of culture, Boas revolutionized the field of anthropology.
Born in 1858 in Germany, Franz Boas received his doctorate from the University of Kiel in 1881. On a scientific expedition to an island off the coast of Canada, he became interested in the local natives’ culture. It sparked his lifelong dedication to the field of anthropology. Boas undertook his first anthropological work in 1886, a study of the Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest. He later served as the curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and in 1899 became Columbia University’s first professor of anthropology.
It was in his role as professor of anthropology that Boas created modern anthropology. In the late 19th century, anthropologists rarely made in-depth studies of other cultures, relying instead on theories as to why some cultures differed from European culture. Boas introduced scientific study to the field. He taught his students, among them Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, to apply scientific rigor and emphasized methodology. He popularized field studies as the chief investigation tool of anthropology. By actually living among the subjects of his studies, Boas came to the conclusion that every culture was dynamic and could change over time, if subjected to new conditions. In his 1911 Mind of Primitive Man, Boas deflated the belief that non-Western societies represented a primitive or earlier stage of civilization. The fact that all cultures were not equal meant only that all cultures had not experienced identical historical conditions, Boas argued. Because he believed in the equal worth of all cultures, he attacked social scientists’ practice of ranking races based
On the perceived superiority of northern European culture. He taught his students and other social scientists to evaluate cultures on their own merits, not to compare other cultures with their own.
Boas applied his findings on cultural differences to critique the prevailing racial attitudes in the United States. His dedication to altering America’s views on race arose from a strong liberalism and his commitment to scientific accuracy and purity. Boas stridently argued that people of African ancestry were not naturally inferior to Caucasian people as most white Americans believed. Differences in achievement between the races in the United States could be explained by studying cultural differences and the historical circumstances in which cultures had developed. Boas sought to counteract the prejudices against African Americans by studying and popularizing accounts of the great African civilizations of the past to show that at one time Africans had created greater civilizations than Europeans. African Americans such as Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBoiS were influenced by Boas’s findings and used them in their struggle for equal rights. The work of Boas and his students helped undermine the grip of scientific racism on American culture and fundamentally altered ideas about race.
Further reading: Marshall Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Vernon J. Williams, Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
—Michael Hartman