Sometimes being polite just doesn’t work. Like the 20e century at dawn, American women’s suffrage activists were concluding that decades of quiet appeals to reason and logic had failed to advance their cause.
New strategies were needed. A new generation of determined women across the country were eager to embrace the dramatic, if not confrontational, tactics men employed in their own battles for power and influence. Abandoning wise and dignified lobbying, these new suffragists embraced controversy and courted publicity to appeal directly to the public. No tactics were forbidden: parades and contests, suffrage schools, “suffrage trains” and even “suffrage barge” on the Mississippi. The women threw bottles containing suffrage messages into the sea and threw Votes for Women leaflets off the biplanes. They went on hunger strikes in prison and then went on to publicize what it was like to be force-fed. Their renewed campaign would not give any punch, neither in ambition nor in creativity.
First protest march planned in Washington
Cover of the program of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association procession in Washington, DC, March 3, 1913.
VCG Wilson / Corbis / Getty Images
When Woodrow Wilson arrived in Washington, DC the day before his inauguration as 20e President on March 3, 1913, the platform at Union Station was strangely empty. As it turned out, crowds had already flocked to Pennsylvania Avenue to watch something really revolutionary: a massive parade for women’s suffrage, the first political protest march organized in the capital. New York activist Inez Milholland, riding her gray horse with long hair waving behind her back, led up to 10,000 women in front of an estimated crowd of half a million. Trumpets stationed at each intersection marked their approach; speakers along the way relayed the events to those in the back of the crowd who could not see for themselves.
Hosted by Alice Paul, 28 – who had learned the art of propaganda from British suffragists – the parade was meant to show that women can be smart and knowledgeable and vote, without losing their grace and femininity. However, rowdies in the crowd appeared to outnumber supporters, and only volunteers holding back the crowd prevented suffrage opponents from physically attacking the women as they marched.
READ MORE: This huge women’s march drowned out a presidential inauguration in 1913
Transcending color barriers
Ida B. Wells
R. Gates / Hulton Archives / Getty Images
When southern women objected to black women’s participation in mainstream events like the 1913 march, organizers nodded. But some women of color have ignored these restrictions. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the anti-lynching crusader journalist who co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago that year, fully intended to march with the Illinois delegation at the giant event in Washington until organizers told her (and other black women) to march in the back of the parade as a racially isolated unit. “Either I’m coming with you or not at all,” Wells-Barnett said. Nowhere to be seen at the start of the parade did she actually squash the event halfway through, one noted. Chicago Tribune reporter at the scene: “Suddenly, from the crowd on the sidewalk, Mrs. Barnett calmly walked over to the delegation and took her place” among the all-white delegates from Illinois.
Black and brown suffrage activists weren’t just fighting for the vote; they also fought for civil rights and an end to racial violence and injustice – and they often did so by consolidating their message. Suffragists of color may have waved purple banners (one of the hues closely associated with the cause of women’s suffrage), but the distinctive motto adopted by the National Association of Colored Women: “Lifting as We Climb” was marked on many of them.
READ MORE: 5 black suffragists who fought for the 19th Amendment – and more
Aerial ‘bombardments’
Women who couldn’t vote could still take to the air – literally – to claim the franchise. In the summer of 1912, activists from Indianapolis chartered a hot air balloon from which vote buttons were dropped to spectators below. In May 1913, “General” Rosalie Jones, a seasoned activist, jumped into the passenger seat of a biplane, tied her skirts with blue string, and took off. By the time she arrived at a Staten Island aerial carnival 15 minutes later to deliver a speech, she had scattered hundreds of yellow pro-suffrage brochures to the gathered crowds. In 1916, Lucy Burns left the “Suffrage Special” train in Seattle to board a seaplane and bombard the city with leaflets promoting the National Women’s Party convention scheduled for that year in Chicago.
Activists planned a similar attack on President Wilson’s yacht later in the year while attending a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty. Leda Richberg-Hornsby, the first female to graduate from the Wright Brothers’ flight school, took to the rudder (wearing pants, not a skirt) and, with Ida Blair, took off with suffrage brochures. Unfortunately, strong winds brought down the “Suff Bird Women” on Staten Island. (Both survived with only bruises.)
READ MORE: 7 things you might not know about women’s suffrage
The suffrage bell
A large crowd surrounds a truck carrying the Justice Bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell cast by Pennsylvania suffragists and used for campaigning between 1915-1920, photographed in Sayre, Pa. On June 23, 1915.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection / Gado / Getty Images
Some smaller-scale campaigns, although less dramatic, have been powerful. In 1915, Philadelphia suffragist Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger commissioned a bronze replica of the Liberty Bell. The Justice Bell (aka the Suffrage Bell) did not replicate the distinctive crack of the original, but its clapper was immobilized to silence the bell – symbolic of America’s speechless women.
Volunteers led Judge Bell, seated in the back of a pickup truck, on a 5,000-mile campaign odyssey through each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. Along the way, suffragists used it as a prop to urge voters to approve a state referendum granting women the right to vote. (The referendum failed.) When Congress ratified on 19e amendment in 1920, the beating of the suffrage bell was finally unleashed and it rang in celebration, ringing once for every state in the United States.
READ MORE: Why the 19th Amendment doesn’t guarantee all women the right to vote
Fashion & Art
Suffrage seat historian Helena H. Woods visiting cartoonist Nina Allender’s office to see her work for the suffrage movement, c. 1920.
Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
By 1913, the women who paraded in Washington had all donned pure white dresses to display the purity of their purpose, as well as the fact that they remained feminine. In addition, wearing the color yellow (especially accented with blue or purple) indicated suffragist sympathies.
For decades, opponents of suffrage had expressed their ridicule in political cartoons. In the 1910s, artists turned the situation around and replaced mocking stereotypes of hysterical women with images of frivolous or selfish and smug anti-suffragists. Works by artists like Nina Allender have shown women in control of their own lives – savvy and always stylish, but willing to fight for their rights. A 1916 cartoon in Crisis, the magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, showed a black woman preparing to defend her fellow black Americans of both sexes against segregation while wielding a bat representing the U.S. Constitution.
READ MORE: How the early suffragists left black women out of their fight
Suffragism on silver screen
Women have also turned to the new film industry to help them advocate for their cause. Ruth Medill McCormick, daughter of a US senator and wife of the Chicago Tribune publisher, funded and helped produce a dramatic film to illustrate the plight of women deprived of their basic rights – including the vote. Such a film, she and her collaborators hoped, would be to women’s suffrage what the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been abolished, motivating moviegoers to take up a cause.
Your daughter and mine debuted at the end of 1914. After her protagonist Rosalind marries out of love, she discovers that her new husband is a brutal drunkard. Refused to divorce by state laws, Rosalind runs away with her children, but that’s only because she seeks refuge in a state that grants women the right to vote that she is acquitted of the crime of having kidnapped them. Her husband gets his desserts righteous (murdered by a wife he beats), and Rosalind happily remarries a pro-suffrage politician. The film influenced some viewers, with one reviewer concluding that “if women are able to earn a living, they are able to have the right to vote.”
READ MORE: Night of Terror: When Suffragists Were Jailed and Tortured
Fiery Messages
WATCH: The 19th Amendment
Pro-suffrage protests increased in number, intensity and creativity in the decade leading up to the adoption of the 19e amendment. In 1918, when the Senate failed to ratify the first National Suffrage Bill, a group of protesters dubbed the “Silent Sentinels” wore black mourning armbands. In December, in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, suffragists commemorated the Boston Tea Party by burning any books, speeches or documents written by President Wilson in which he used the words “freedom” or “democracy.” Protesters greeted the New Year by lighting the first “Watchfire of Freedom” in a Greek urn just outside the White House, lit using wood from a tree on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. When counter-demonstrators tried to put out the blaze, other women rushed to rekindle the fire and keep it on. Finally, the women added an effigy of the president they called “Kaiser Wilson” on the fire.
READ MORE: 19th Amendment: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women’s Suffrage
