Give Women the Vote!
Nineteen years after Coxey’s Army, Alice Paul would orchestrate a 5,000 woman strong Washington march to impress upon a new President the need for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. While studying in England, Paul became involved in the English suffragette movement. Returning to the U.S. in 1909, she found no counterpart in the U.S. and so set out to change the face of the woman’s movement.
From 1910 to 1912 at the urging of Alice Paul, Anne Howard Shaw and Harriet Stanton Blatch, the women's movement became more assertive, beginning to publicly demonstrate and winning the vote in California in 1911,as well as in a handful of other states, mostly in the west. Using these states successes as models, Paul decided a March to Washington was in order to impress upon the new President, Woodrow Wilson, the urgency of 'the feminine franchise."
But unlike Coxey's March, Paul thought any demonstration involving only women marchers should refrain from confrontation. She urged instead a demonstration and celebration of the strength of female virtue and knowledge. Thus rather than organizing a march on the capitol building itself, Paul sought to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and to stage a pageant for those who had arrived to attend Wilson's inauguration the next day. Wilson's own inaugural committee had actually forbade women from participating in any of the parades. But nothing would stop the staging of this women's celebration on the steps of the Treasury Building on March 3, 1913. The figure of Columbia, dressed in a flowing gown of red, white and blue, appeared first and alone at the top of the steps of the Treasury accompanied by strains of the Star Spangled Banner. And the pageant overshadowed even the President-elect's own arrival.
Paul had decided the march and pageant should occur the day before Wilson's inaugural parade when Washington was already crowded with spectators. The New York Times estimated 250,000 watched the suffragists in their white, purple and gold parading up Pennsylvania Avenue. Many of the men lining the streets were insulting and sought to disrupt the march, while authorities did nothing to interfere. But the women pressed on, choosing not to retaliate lest it blemish the day and stain the future of their cause. Indeed seven years later the nineteenth amendment to the Constitiution was ratified and women were allowed the vote.