Women’s Political Union Buttons and the Clarion Design

In 1907, Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, created the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later called the Women’s Political Union, modeled after Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant Women’s Social and Political Union. The League committed itself to reaching out to working-class women, rejecting the WSPU’s history of violence, but borrowing their purple, green, and white official color scheme along with one of Pankhurst’s quotations, “Deeds not Words,” a ubiquitous phrase that had been used previously in American politics.

Borrowed also from England, not, however, from the WSPU but instead from the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies instead, was Caroline Watts’ Clarion figure, portrayed on the accompanying images here, first used to advertise a procession of the NUWSS held on June 13, 1908. The varying amount of stars that are pictured on these buttons alludes to the different number of “suffrage states” that existed at the time of their issue. On each occasion that another state became part of the suffrage column, a new button had to be made.