Harriet Taylor Upton

Title

Harriet Taylor Upton

Subject

What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever changed your mind about?

Harriet Taylor Upton was staunchly opposed to women voting - so opposed that she was writing an anti-suffrage article for publication. In the course of researching the article, she realized she was wrong. Thread.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard suffragists make the case. Upton heard Susan B Anthony speak in her hometown of Warren, Ohio in the 1870s. A decade later she saw Susan B again - this time with ElizCadyStanton AND Lucy Stone. She had heard the message. Why was she not convinced? 

Luck. Privilege. Upton was very close to her father, a lawyer & judge. When Ezra Taylor was elected to Congress in 1880, he was a widower and took his daughter with him as his hostess; really, his protégée. She came to know all the leading Republicans, and understood politics.

She rejected what today we’d call grievance politics. One argument for suffrage was that men did a bad job representing women’s interests. But that wasn’t Harriet Upton’s experience. Ironically, her father supported suffrage before she did. Which sort of proved her point...

If your father, who trusts you and takes your intellect seriously, is also a judge then a member of Congress, and seemingly a good guy--he spoke out against the Chinese Exclusion Act and championed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act--you might feel pretty well-represented by him.

It takes character to reconsider a firmly-held position and admit you were wrong. Harriet Taylor Upton devoted the next 30 years to suffrage. She became the national treasurer of NAWSA; for a few years her house was the national headquarters!

In 1924, she could finally run for Congress herself. She ran for her father’s seat - and lost. She was 70 years old by then. Imagine if she had been allowed to run sooner.

#suffrage100 #19thAmendment #Selichot

Creator

Daily Suffragist

Date

Sept 13, 2020

Files

Harriet Taylor Upton.jpg
Sept 12, 2020.png

Citation

Daily Suffragist, “Harriet Taylor Upton,” Daily Suffragist, accessed November 4, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/507.

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