Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913
On March 3, 1913, Marie, a young female teacher, marched alongside her close co-workers and thousands of others for hours. It was a sunny afternoon, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, where over five thousand women and men gathered to march from the Capitol to the Department of Treasury building in the fight for women’s rights to vote.
Earlier that year, after coming home from work, she read about the event in multiple newspapers and eagerly shared it with all of her friends. She had always been invested in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and believed in women’s rights because of the values instilled by her upbringing and family. She never understood why women were always denied opportunities and could never have rights of their own.
During the week leading up to the march, she and her co-workers took a leave from teaching and went on a train from New York to Washington, D.C.. Full of excitement, they all carried along boards and colorful pens to decorate their signs and banners.
On the day of the march, she walked proudly with signs in her hands, shouting chants as loud as she could with the thousands of others who were marching too. It was so satisfying for her to see how many women were there, but it also hurt seeing how many others were just there to oppose the idea of women’s rights.
What was only supposed to be a short 40-minute-mile walk took several hours instead. During the march, Marie was painfully shoved and jeered away from her friends, but she persisted and continued to march and protest. Thousands of men and other hostile, anti-feminist spectators tried so hard to end the event, crowding over routes to block their path while others pushed, harassed, and attacked the marchers.
Despite the hostility all the participants faced, the march did not stop. Marie remembered holding her sign harder from the frustration that she felt. How could something so simple as giving women the right to vote infuriate others so much?
As they finally began to reach the Treasury building, the densely packed crowd slowly dispersed as the event was coming to an end. As she started to walk away, she saw police struggling to fight off the aggressive spectators in the corner of her eye. Still, the voices and footsteps of her and the thousands of other activists had made an everlasting impact on women’s rights that the spectators could not take away.
In 1920, the 19th Amendment for women’s right to vote was finally passed and ratified.
