Harriet Taylor Upton

• Harriet Upton
• Born: December 17, 1853
• Died: November 2, 1945

Suffragist, writer, and Republican party leader, was born in Ravenna, Ohio, the elder of two children and only daughter of Ezra Booth Taylor, a prominent lawyer and circuit-court judge, and Harriet M. (Frazer) Taylor. Her maternal ancestors were among the earliest settlers in the Western Reserve area of northeastern Ohio. In her youth she frequently accompanied her father on election-campaign trips that provided her with an education in the operation of the American political system.

In 1861 the family moved to Warren, Ohio. Harriet Taylor attended the local district school and then Warren High School, where she was the first female student admitted to the chemistry laboratory. She did not go on to college, partly because of her father’s opposition. Instead she traveled with him on his circuit-court route in northern Ohio. She joined the Trumbull County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and was elected its secretary. She also occasionally attended woman suffrage meetings, but was not, at the time, a supporter of the cause.

In 1880 Judge Taylor, a Republican party member, was elected to Congress. Harriet Taylor moved to Washington to act as his official hostess since her mother had died. In July 1884 she married George Whitman Upton, her father’s law partner, who was from Oregon. The Uptons lived in Washington when Congress was in session, but established their main residence in Warren. Representative Taylor became chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, and through him Harriet Upton made the acquaintance of prominent Republican leaders.

In 1888 she met some of America’s leading suffragists. Her father had become an active supporter of the cause, but Upton stayed aloof until research she undertook for an antisuffrage article changed her mind. She joined the National Americal Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, was its treasurer from 1894 to 1920, and was acting chairman of its congressional committee. In 1902 she became the editor of Progress, a monthly newspaper that was NAWSA’s official voice from 1907, and from 1903 to 1909 she ran the daily operations of the association out of Warren.

In addition to these activities, Upton served twice as president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association (1899-1908 and 1911-20). Through her efforts, women obtained municipal suffrage in Ohio in 1916 and the state legislatures of Ohio and Tennessee were persuaded to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. She was also a member of the Warren Board of Education, continued her work for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and joined the Episcopal church (she had been raised a Presbyterian).

Upton wrote a number of children’s stories for magazines and historical books. Her first major writing effort was a child’s history entitled Our Early Presidents: Their Wives and Children, from Washington to Jackson (1892). This was followed by A Twentieth-Century History of Trumbull County, Ohio, (1909), and History of the Western Reserve, 3 vols. (1910). She felt strongly that historians had too often ignored the role of women in America’s history, and her works aimed at correcting this neglect. Many of her articles on women’s rights appeared in national magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar and Ladies’ Home Journal. She also contributed a chapter on woman suffrage to Charles B. Galbreath’s History of Ohio (1925).

After the suffrage fight was won, Upton took a prominent part in the activities of the Republican party and in 1920 was appointed vice chairman of the Republican National Executive Committee; she kept that post—one of the highest yet held by an American woman—for four years, using her influence and acquaintances to help place women in government positions. She was largely responsible for the admission of women to the diplomatic service and successfully lobbied for the passage of legislation regulating child labor.

In 1923 George Upton died. The following year Harriet Upton made an unsuccessful bid for her father’s old congressional seat. She served as the Ohio Republican party’s assistant state campaign manager in 1928, then as special assistant to Ohio’s Department of Public Welfare.

Upton retired from politics and moved to Pasadena, California, in 1931. She died there at the age of ninety-one of heart disease.

Harriet Upton’s papers are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Also housed there is mimeographed copy of her autobiography, “Random Recollections” (1927). There is no full-length biography of Upton. The best recent account of her life can be found in Notable American Women (1971). Additional material can be found in Who Was Who in America, vol. 2 (1950), and E. Evans, “Women in the Washington Scene,”Century, August 1923. For her suffrage activities, see S. B. Anthony and I. Harper, eds., History of Women Suffrage, vols. 4-6 (1902-22); R. Neely ed., Women in Ohio (1939); and F. E. Allen and M. Welles, The Ohio Woman Suffrage Movement (1952). For her government activities in Ohio, see H. Walker, Constructive Government in Ohio: The Story of the Administration of Governor Myers Y. Cooper (1948). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, November 4, 1945.