Parading for Progress

The 1913 Women's Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, unprecedented in both its scale and its tactics, was a major turning point for the woman suffrage movement in the United States. Suffrage leader Alice Paul, who was recently elected head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s Congressional Committee, devised the idea for a large-scale public demonstration. Paul, who had spent time in England, witnessed the more militant tactics that the British suffragettes used to draw attention to their cause. 

During the mid-1800s, female abolitionists began drawing parallels between the condition of the enslaved population and their own condition as prisoners within a patriarchal society. Drawing on this sentiment, women’s rights activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organized a convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, during which they advocated for female suffrage. The Seneca Falls Convention is recognized as the beginning of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States.

Despite the movement’s continuous growth after the convention, not all women were, or felt, welcomed in it. The mostly white movement often discriminated against black women working toward the same goal, and while the AWSA supported the 15th Amendment granting black men the vote, the NWSA did not because it neglected women. In 1890, however, both organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which sought the vote for all American women.

Parade organizers strategically selected March 3, 1913 for the march. Woodrow Wilson was to be inaugurated as the new President the following day, and national press was in town and idle awaiting the inaugural festivities. 

When Paul began to organize a national suffrage parade, a key component of her plan was to channel media attention toward women’s voting rights. Paul had first-hand experience with British suffragettes’ use of pageantry and knew that New York suffragists had staged spectacular parades down Fifth Avenue in the prior three years. These savvy women knew that street spectacle drew attention to their cause.

Women from all over the United States and abroad traveled to Washington, DC to participate in the march. Paul, working with Mary Church Terrell, allowed African American women to participate, but they had to march in the back of the parade. Prominent civil rights activist and suffragist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett didn't agree with the decision. While she started in the back, she ran to the front once the parade began to join the women in her state's delegation. 

Eventually, the procession made it to its final destination: the steps of the Treasury Building. There an allegorical tableaux was performed on the steps of the building. 

Despite the chaos and violence that initially ensued during the parade, Paul declared the event a success. The parade made national headlines and once again captured the public’s interest in the suffrage movement. The parade and the crowd’s behavior drew attention to the suffragists’ cause. Readers were appalled to learn of the attacks and the police inaction. Even those who opposed votes for women acknowledged that, as citizens, the women had the right to peacefully assemble. That right had been abridged.

Paul wanted suffragists to organize more parades and protests to get the public’s attention. She hoped this strategy would help secure the passage of a federal suffrage amendment. NAWSA, however, opposed these militant tactics. Its leaders preferred state-by-state campaigns and traditional methods like petitioning legislatures and lobbying politicians. Soon after the parade, militant suffragists (under Paul’s leadership) broke away from NAWSA and founded the Congressional Union. In 1917, they renamed their group the National Woman’s Party (NWP).

The combination of NAWSA’s war efforts and the publicity attracted by the NWP's pickets of the White House led to widespread support for woman suffrage. Although President Woodrow Wilson previously had refused to endorse suffrage, in September 1918 he addressed the Senate in favor of votes for women. He appealed to patriotic arguments for suffrage when he asked representatives, “We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

After the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920, female activists continued to use politics to reform society. NAWSA became the League of Women Voters. In 1923, the NWP proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to ban discrimination based on sex. The League of Women Voters and efforts to pass the ERA continue today.

The 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade set a precedent for future large-scale demonstrations in the Nation’s Capital. 

The January 21, 2017 Women’s March followed the legacy of the 1913 Suffrage Parade using pageantry and symbolism to garner media attention. Many women wore suffrage sashes honoring the suffragists that marched before them and pink hats as a sign of solidarity.