“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.”
—GROVER CLEVELAND
LIDA STOKES ADAMS, A PROMINENT advocate of woman’s suffrage, took a dim view of the chivalry displayed on the sinking Titanic. “I think,” she declared, “the women should have insisted that the boats be filled with an equal number of men.”
For embattled feminists like Miss Adams, the disaster came at the worst possible time. They were planning a “mammoth” suffrage parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue, to be held Saturday, May 4, 1912. Now—with the great day less than three weeks off—the Titanic raised all sorts of problems. The entire country was carried away by the gallantry of men who died that women might live. At such a time, how did it look to raise the cry of equal rights?
Some leaders like Lida Adams merely regretted that the woman passengers had failed to demand an equal chance to drown. But others felt that there was something ungrateful—almost blasphemous—about parading at this particular moment. Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College, indignantly returned her pledge card, noting, “After the superb unselfishness and heroism of the men on the Titanic, your march is untimely and pathetically unwise.”
It was decided to carry on, but now other fears arose. It was said that Tammany Hall, always against suffrage, planned to station rowdies along the line of march. It was rumored that the Socialist working girls hoped to make some political hay—wear red sashes and sing the “Marseillaise.” And when Theodore Roosevelt declined “with thanks” an invitation to join the men’s brigade, it seemed another ill omen. After all, the colonel had a reputation for sensing which way the wind blew.
And in fact, many people did have strong ideas on the subject. At the turn of the century, the American woman of the upper brackets lived (or was meant to live) a curious cocoonlike existence, lovingly preserved by the men in her life. “It is exceedingly bad manners,” explained Edward Bok’s Ladies’ Home Journal, a leading proponent of shelter, “for a girl to slap a man on the back, or lay a hand upon him in any way, or for him to touch her except for a friendly handshake.”
“Ladies” were guarded by maids, chaperones, or older gentlemen ever ready to “offer their services.” The middle-class housewife was less elaborately convoyed, but she was also far less exposed. She was mostly relegated to a service function—basically dreary, even though one of her “services” was to provide, as always, the feminine love and support without which heroes fail. The working-class woman was nowhere at all … she was almost literally a slave whose reward if any was to be found in heaven.
Some, of course, had to work. But far better if they didn’t. “Men,” observed Henry Finck in the April, 1901, Independent, “want a girl who has not rubbed off the peach blossom of innocence by exposure to a rough world.”
An emphatic answer came the following August when Anna Edna Taylor, a 160-pound Texas schoolmarm, shot Niagara Falls in a barrel. An unimportant achievement by an unknown woman, but a good opening gun for the revolution that was starting. The ladies just wouldn’t stay put any longer. All kinds were bursting to the forefront—Carry Nation smashing saloons … Ida Tarbell dissecting business … Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock riding cross-saddle … Emma Goldman preaching anarchy … Jane Addams plunging into settlement work … and everybody’s idol, the demure Gibson Girl, taking up golf and tennis.
Bewildered males found a dozen reasons for the eruption. The bicycle craze encouraged simpler domes. New appliances gave housewives more leisure. Immigration brought in women who didn’t know better. New office machinery meant that even a girl could be a secretary. Probably all played a part, but whatever the explanation, the march was on … although frequently interrupted by cries of astonishment, indignation and sometimes the law.
“You can’t do that on Fifth Avenue!” thundered one of New York’s first mounted policemen at a lady cowering in the rear of an automobile, trying to sneak a cigarette. And he was right—she was promptly arrested. This was September 27, 1904; and four years later the police were still at it, when the city passed the Sullivan Ordinance forbidding women to smoke in public. But the ladies fought on, and by 1910 had invaded the White House itself. At an official dinner that January, Baroness Rosen, wife of the Russian ambassador, asked President Taft for a cigarette. As everyone watched, the President smilingly surrendered and sent his aide Archie Butt to borrow one somewhere. Thanks to the orchestra leader, Butt was successful and excitedly wrote the news that night to his sister-in-law Clara. “I am glad to say,” he primly added, “that the American women did not indulge.”
Clothes provided another lively battlefield. Bit by bit the women chipped away at the old restraints—the rainy day skirt in 1902, the hobble skirt in 1909. Yet there was always stubborn opposition. Dr. Edward Bruce of the New York Board of Education was particularly shocked by the trend to bloomers. Perhaps permissible in the privacy of a gym, but on a public playground they were certainly “giving the children a false notion.”
On the beach, it was more than a controversy over costume. The question was the propriety of swimming itself. Traditionally a lady might dip and wade, but not much more. Now women were also demanding the freedom of the seas. In 1904 the magazine Outing capitulated, deciding that if they had to swim they should at least know how. “The beginner should first enter the water gradually,” the editor advised, “wade out to her knees, to her waist, and finally to her neck. Then, stooping until she is entirely submerged, she should remain so for a second. For the first time or two it is permissible to close the nose with thumb and finger before sinking.”
Automobiling was an even more exciting way to enjoy emancipation. The Gibson Girl soon appeared behind the wheel, crumpling the fender of a Richard Harding Davis-like male—whose only reaction was blind, instant love. It pointed up a theory which gained prompt and lasting acceptance: Women just weren’t good drivers. On March 9, 1908, Mayor Markbreit of Cincinnati declared flatly: “No woman is physically fit to run an auto.”
Markbreit was a politician, so it was perhaps no coincidence that woman’s hardest battle was on the political front. Ever since the Civil War a small ardent band of suffragists led by pioneers like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been fighting an uphill battle for the vote. After 480 campaigns they still could boast only four victories—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. Now these old leaders were dying—Mrs. Stanton in 1902, Miss Anthony in 1906—and the opposition remained as implacable as ever.
To a certain extent the foe was organized, well-heeled, and a little sinister. The early suffragists were great reformers, and from this the more powerful lobbies drew the flattering deduction that all women voters would want reform. The timber, beef, and especially liquor lobbies fought hard against suffrage. But opposition also came from the most respectable quarters.
Bishop John H. Vincent, founder of the Chautauqua movement, thought that woman suffrage would deprive man of his most exalted role: “It is his glory to represent her. To rob him of this right is to weaken both.” James M. Buckley, brilliant editor of the Christian Advocate, was a little less gallant: He felt that you couldn’t tell one woman from another, and multiple voting would result.
“Jackasses,” snorted Father Vaughan, a Boston priest, offering his opinion of women as voters. Others were more tactful, but there was no doubt how they felt. “We all know how much further women go than men in their social rivalries and jealousies,” Grover Cleveland gently explained in the October, 1905, issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The ex-President went on to stress, “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.”
The place “assigned” to woman was, of course, The Home. To leave the home and enter the voting booth couldn’t help but be disruptive. Some declared that women would lose their femininity. Humor magazines like Life depicted legions of tough battle-axes bullying meek little men; and in 1906 an unknown wit defined a suffragette as “one who has ceased to be a lady and not yet become a gentleman.”
The suffragists’ bitterest blow was that so many women were unsympathetic. Mrs. Charles B. Gulick of the Massachusetts Public Interest League asked, “Why add a perfectly useless body of voters?” Ida Tarbell (of all people) declared that it was simply unfair to ask women to do men’s work. Mrs. Clarence H. Wildes distributed pictures showing a Denver lady accepting a box of chocolates in payment for her vote. Vassar girls paraded about the campus carrying mops, banging pans, singing “Home, Sweet Home.” One of them also brandished a sign bearing the dark warning: “Remember that suffrage means office holding.”
This, of course, referred to the worst fate of all. Women would not only stray from the home, but fall into the filth of political life. It made some ladies indignant just to think about it. As Gail Hamilton wrote, “Women have a right to claim exemption from political duty and responsibility; and men have no right to lay the burden upon them.”
The “burden” of the ballot was a familiar American theme, but Englishmen were less protective. Watching the same struggle unfold in Britain, Sir Almroth Wright was anything but solicitous. The trouble was, he declared, women no longer knew their place. Too few learned about “the defects and limitations of the feminine mind.” Too many suffered from “the failure to recognize that man is the master.”
But the British women didn’t seem to understand. “I shall spit at you!” screamed twenty-six-year-old Christabel Pankhurst at the perspiring constable trying to get her out of a 1905 political meeting in Manchester. Miss Pankhurst was being expelled for asking about votes for women, and her assault on the bobby was part of a careful plan. Her mother, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, was a dedicated suffragist who had given up trying to win the ballot by sweet reason. Her group, the Women’s Social and Political Union, would dramatize the cause by violence.
The idea caught fire immediately. Women flocked to Mrs. Pankhurst’s green, white, and purple banner. Militancy spread—to use Lloyd George’s rueful simile—“like hoof-and-mouth disease.” The Suffragettes (as the Daily Mail christened them) stormed Parliament, heckled candidates, broke up political meetings everywhere. It did no good to try and keep them out—they hid under platforms, popped out of organ lofts, slipped in as messenger boys. And it was useless to arrest them. They seemed to thrive on night sticks, arm twisting, rabbit punches, and jail.
More was to follow. When Minister Haldane spoke at Liverpool’s Sun Hall in 1909, the dashing Mary Leigh mounted the next-door roof with a hatchet, chopped up the slates, and hurled them down on the auditorium skylight. At the Lord Mayor of London’s dinner that November, two Suffragettes got in disguised as charwomen, smashed a banquet hall window, and raised their howl of defiance. A little later Emily Davison started burning mailboxes, and at Great Western Station young Theresa Garnett whipped Winston Churchill with a riding crop.
The news spread across the Atlantic—an electric jolt to the drooping American movement. These Englishwomen were no burly Amazons or dowdy teachers: Mrs. Pankhurst was deftly graceful … Christabel had a radiant sprightliness… Lady Constance Lytton was as patrician as they came. They set American imaginations spinning.
The dedicated Harriot Stanton Blatch soon revamped her moribund group along English lines. Spirited young women like Alice Paul, a battling Quaker from Pennsylvania, quickly joined the fight. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont—at loose ends since the death of her husband—rushed to London, picked up some pointers from the Pankhursts, returned to form her own Political Equality Association. Mrs. Clarence Mackay was not far behind. She, of course, couldn’t be under Mrs. Belmont, so she set up the Equal Franchise Society. As the two squared off, old-line suffragists enjoyed a rare treat—all the money and ingenuity that once went into social rivalry were now poured into “the cause” instead.
Suffrage became fashionable. Attractive Society girls like Inez Milholland and Portia Willis entered the fold, adding a glamorous touch that was badly needed. And if there was still any doubt that the movement was feminine as well as feminist, it vanished the day Lillian Russell joined up.
An ever-growing army of young Progressives were also intrigued. They discovered that suffrage wasn’t a mere political artifact left over from Abolitionist days. As practiced by the English, it was something new … part of that brighter world ahead—like initiative, referendum, recall, and direct primaries. Dreary clerics like the Reverend Buckley might still hang back, but the brilliant young Rabbi Stephen S. Wise saw it clearly. So did the engaging Foster Peabody and dozens of other enthusiastic reformers.
By 1910 Mrs. Blatch decided it was time for the Americans to try some dramatics of their own. She announced that her Women’s Political Union would lead a parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue. Not quite like smashing up Parliament, but still it was a start.
The other leaders were shocked. Militancy, it turned out, was inspiring—three thousand miles away. To walk down the middle of the street themselves was a different matter. The distinguished pioneer Dr. Anna Howard Shaw feared “so radical a demonstration.” Mrs. Mackay pounded the table in helpless rage. Mrs. Belmont retired to Long Island, coldly announcing that “ill health” prevented her from attending.
Only a few hundred ladies were in line when America’s first suffrage parade got under way on the afternoon of May 21. A cold, penetrating drizzle drenched the gowns of the college women, left the bunting wilted and soggy. A few younger girls like Portia Willis felt the exaltation of early Christians, but dozens deserted the ranks or took to limousines. Some of the scanty crowd clapped, more jeered, but for the most part, the women suffered the crudest blow of all—they were ignored.
In 1911 Mrs. Blatch grimly announced they would try again. Once more Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Mackay begged off. Once more the city looked the other way; Mayor Gaynor, invited to review the parade, refused to have anything to do with it.
Yet there were grounds for hope. During the past year Washington had gone for suffrage—the first state since 1896—and this time the weather was mild and sunny. On Saturday, May 6, about three thousand women were ready at the appointed time, awaiting only the signal to march.
“Young man,” exploded seventy-year-old Emma Butterworth Danforth several hours later, “if you say anything to make this parade look ridiculous, I’ll never forgive you.” The Tribune reporter was only too happy to surrender: “Her warning was unneeded. One cannot ridicule one’s grandmother.”
But it was all too clear that the parade had again been less than successful. Although the crowds were certainly bigger, the jeering was far worse. “The barber shop wit was out in force,” the New York Tribune observed, “and the brass foundry humorist manned every street corner, bellowing his ancient and bewhiskered jests at the loudest of his raucous voice.”
The ninety-four members of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, who bravely marched as a unit, suffered especially. “Lizzie!” was the mildest thing they heard, and as they passed the Waldorf, a wet Turkish towel came hurtling down from above. Nor did it help when Oswald Garrison Villard was assigned to carry a banner that read, “Men have the vote—why not we?”
Most galling of all, the parade didn’t start on time. Scheduled to begin at 3:30, it didn’t get under way until 4:10. True, there was a good excuse—the weary tail-enders of a marathon race still monopolized the avenue—but few people swallowed that. Everyone knew that women were never on time; that was one more reason why they shouldn’t vote.
Yet the movement would not die. Sometimes a brave try can achieve more than a gaudy triumph, and even the opposition New York Times conceded that the women “did not lose but gained respect.” That November they won California, and as 1912 dawned new campaigns were launched in six Western states. Across the ocean their English allies also stepped up the attack. On March 1 the Suffragettes smashed shop windows all over London’s West End; a few days later Nurse Pitfield introduced a new note by trying to set fire to the General Post Office. Lecturing in Michigan, Sylvia Pankhurst noted that the new British outbreaks stirred tremendous excitement … but serious misgivings too.
Suffrage was in fact at the crossroads. California had been won—but by the narrowest of margins. If the outlook was bright in Oregon, it was all too dark in Wisconsin. Militancy clearly surpassed the old debating society approach, yet pushed too far it might be disastrous.
No wonder the leaders were on edge as the day of the 1912 parade drew near. No wonder they worried about the Titanic, Socialist demonstrations, and Colonel Roosevelt’s absence. And as if all that wasn’t enough, a host of little things went wrong. The Finnish delegation, subjects of the Czar, refused to appear under the Russian flag. Mrs. Clarence Mackay again said she wouldn’t march. The lovely Inez Milholland—suffrage’s answer to the Amazon charge—came down with a bad cold and was ordered to bed by her doctor. All the women were up in arms against the official 37-cent hat, lovingly if impractically concocted to give the parade some semblance of uniformity.
“Uniformity of dress was the dream of artists for us,” Mrs. Blatch conceded in her final orders the night before the parade. Then she added a bright thought: “Distaste for conforming may be but the promise of independence in a future voter.”
Mrs. Blatch had come a long way as a diplomat. Daughter of the sainted Elizabeth Cady Stanton, normally she was fiercely inflexible in the old feminist tradition. She had fought this fight on every front—even battling the English school system for giving the girls easier arithmetic than the boys. She was not known for her open mind, but this time was different. It was so important to co-operate that she buried her instincts, working smoothly and tactfully with a dozen willful groups. She was even willing to compromise with Mrs. Jean Penfield, whose Woman’s Suffrage Party wanted a torchlight parade so badly. Mrs. Blatch stuck them at the end of the line, where they could march in the dark to their hearts’ content.
On only one point was she absolutely adamant. The parade must start on time—“at five o’clock and not one minute later.” There must be no repetition of last year’s tardiness—the howls of male derision still rankled. “Remember,” she beseeched in her final instructions, “the public will judge, quite illogically of course, but no less strictly, your qualification as a voter by your promptness.”
At exactly 4:57 P.M. on the sunny afternoon of May 4 two long bugle blasts sounded above the bedlam that swirled around New York’s Washington Square. “They’re coming! They’re coming!” cried the crowd that lined Fifth Avenue. And sure enough, at 5:00 on the dot, a cavalry detachment clattered past Washington Arch (known by the zealots as “Martha Washington Arch”) and swung up the Avenue.
Fifty women made up this mounted vanguard. A year ago none had been willing to ride; now they wore three-cornered hats at a cocky angle and some even sat astride their horses. Proudly leading the troop was Mrs. Charles E. Knoblauch, whose husband had appropriately been a Rough Rider. But most eyes were focused on the girl just behind her. There, miraculously risen from her sickbed, was the radiant Inez Milholland.
Years afterward it would be difficult to decide just how beautiful Miss Milholland really was. According to legend, she inspired at least one novel and her glance could reduce the toughest legislator to a blushing schoolboy. On the other hand, a contemporary recalls, “She was stylish and attractive but not that remarkable.” It is a matter of record, however, that in 1910 Miss Milholland’s mere appearance was enough to break up a Republican rally.
On this lovely May afternoon she was at her best. A photographer dashed up for a picture and by the time she could break away the cavalry was two blocks ahead. Galloping to catch up, she got a big hand from the crowd. A small incident perhaps, but it showed an important change that was taking place. This year instead of the usual good-natured hoots, the people were cheering.
“Everybody’s Doing It” the Old Guard Band played, marching just behind the cavalry; and as the cheering spread, it finally seemed that the song might be right. Just after the band came Grand Marshal Josephine Beiderhase of the Women’s Political Union … then Eleanor Brannan, carrying the WPU banner of green, white, and purple. Traditionally the suffrage color was yellow, but Mrs. Blatch had scornfully tossed it aside. She felt that everything about the old movement was insipid, and for her organization she adopted the colors of Britain’s militant Suffragettes.
Indomitable as ever, Mrs. Blatch herself marched just behind the flag with her executive committee. Having urged everyone to wear white, she turned up in her black Vassar cap and gown. The inconsistency went unnoticed; for they were pouring by now—political workers from Albany … the group from Finland (having finally found a Finnish flag) … two hundred trained nurses in their starched uniforms … Mrs. Otis Skinner and the actresses … teachers … the Washington Irving High School students in their middy blouses … Ida Freese and her tearoom girls … band after band thumping out “What Am I Going to Do to Make You Love Me?”
“Boilermakers!” roared a dissident at the corner of Thirtieth Street.
“Frankfurter makers!” added a companion.
“I’d like to bite their ears off!” shouted still another in the group.
Three detectives rushed over and arrested them for disorderly conduct. This too was something new. In the past, the women were fair game for taunts and insults—the cruder the better. Now the crowd cheered as the hecklers were hauled off to the stationhouse.
The parade rolled on—typists … chocolate dippers … tired factory girls from the East Side sweatshops … then an open carriage covered with lilacs and dogwood blossoms. Half buried in the flowers sat a wrinkled old lady waving a white shawl. It was the Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, eighty-seven years old and the last of the 1848 suffrage pioneers. Originally, it was planned to have twenty maidens draw the carriage, but Mrs. Blackwell was shocked. “Let women be beasts of burden?” she cried. “Why, I wouldn’t even let a man do a thing like that.”
Representatives from the six suffrage states followed, drawing almost as much attention. The crowd pushed and shoved, trying to get a better look at a real live woman voter.
Next came a chipper little figure walking alone in cap and gown. It was Anna Howard Shaw leading her National Woman Suffrage Association. These were the people Mrs. Blatch called soft—but there was nothing weak about them today. They wore their yellow daisies and jonquils and buttercups with martial pride. They even kept step. Dr. Shaw herself was waving and smiling at everyone. High above her head she held a small sign. Referring to Peking’s current experiment with universal suffrage, the message said simply, “Catching up with China.”
This breezy slogan clearly followed Mrs. Blatch’s shrewd advice: “As this is an advertising age, leaders of any movement do well to study somewhat the methods of the press agent.” Most of the banners, however, showed the need for further study: “By Keeping Women out of Politics, the Soul of Our Country Is Diminished by One-Half” … “A Democracy That Recognizes Man Only Is a Dangerous Error” … “To Create Sex Antagonism Is an Unwise Precedent.”
It was twilight now, but still the women flowed past—the non-suffrage states, including a group unaccountably from the Argentine Republic … Miss Annie Peck, the noted mountain climber … Mrs. Marie Stewart, portraying that original Suffragette, Joan of Arc. As Mrs. Mackay’s Equal Franchise Society marched by, everyone noticed that its fashionable leader had again remained aloof. But this year she at least chose her marshal well. Miss Elizabeth Burchenal of the Public School Athletic League was a master at precision drilling; her charges put on a great show.
“Where are your trousers?” cried a caustic Englishman who had somehow turned up in the crowd near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The writer Inez Haynes Gilmore darted from the ranks, grabbed him by the shoulder, gave him a piece of her mind. The crowd laughed its approval, once again showing its change of heart. The march continued, the bands played on—”Oh, You Beautiful Doll” … “Some of These Days You’re Gonna Miss Me, Honey” … “What’s the Matter with Father?”
The music was lost in the uproar that greeted the next contingent. To an ever-swelling tumult of cheers, catcalls, and yells of pure excitement, the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage came swinging into view. Led by the Parkville Fife & Bugle Corps, they marched with heads erect, eyes front—just as Mrs. Blatch had ordered. No longer a beleaguered handful, this year 619 men proudly flaunted the daisies that symbolized their cause.
Nor were they just the innocent crackpots described by anti-suffragists. Leaders in every conceivable field turned up. Hardened politicians like W. C. Amos, head of the 19th District Republican Club, marched with the poet Richard Le Gallienne. Montague Glass, author of the trivial Potash and Perlmutter, strode beside economist Henry Rogers Seager. And still they came—philosopher John Dewey … Rabbi Wise … two troops of Boy Scouts… Robert Bruere, expert in that interesting new field, industrial relations … nine Harvard undergraduates … editor Max Eastman … T. E. Mahan, the admiral’s son … an unidentified grandfather carrying a baby.
“That’s what the rest of us will be doing soon!” shouted a heckler, and whatever the rules on insulting women, it was clear the men were still a valid target:
“Who got the breakfast this morning?”
“Don’t forget to do the dishes tonight!”
“Oh, you daisies!”
But rising above the taunts was the strange new sound of cheering. The men had never heard it before, and it was not a bad sensation. More pleasant surprises lay ahead. As they passed the Waldorf, instead of last year’s wet towel they were greeted with applause. As they marched by the Union League Club, some of the old gentlemen in the windows even waved. And when they reached Delmonico’s, they got the biggest jolt of all. The popular humorist Gelett Burgess, famous for his attacks on the cause, was leaning out the window, tirelessly waving a large yellow suffrage banner.
It was dusk by the time the Woman’s Suffrage Party came tramping by. They had wanted a torchlight parade and now they got it. Grand Marshal Augusta Hughston waved an electric torch, and instantly the long line blazed with flares and Japanese lanterns. In the flickering glare, the women swept on—Mrs. George Arliss with the 15th Assembly District brigade … a big yellow auto scattering leaflets … shirtwaist workers from the Woman’s Trade Union League. In the fading light it was difficult to see the banners carried by the factory girls, and perhaps—for the sake of harmony—it was just as well. One of them ignored suffrage entirely, simply depicted a poor woman crushed by a capitalist pig tagged “Exploitation.” But at least the union didn’t carry out its threat to turn the affair into a Socialist rally. The band that played the “Marseillaise” the loudest belonged to Mrs. Mackay.
In the gathering darkness no policeman recognized the dumpy little lady who slipped through the barrier at Forty-first Street, as the Political Equality Association came marching by. Her white silk suit was three years old; her huge white hat was no more outrageous than any of the others; she seemed just another late recruit. But the women knew, and as she took her place in line, a great shout went up. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont—that devastating autocrat who despised the mere idea of marching in public—had joined the parade.
She walked alone, at the head of the brigade. She seemed cool, poised, completely unperturbed. It was only years later that she confessed to her daughter Consuelo, “To a woman brought up as I was, it was a terrible ordeal.”
Certainly no one knew it that night. When Mrs. Belmont did something, it was done with all the boundless energy and tactical skill she possessed. It was that way when she took on Mrs. Astor and successfully stormed Society. It was that way when she married off Consuelo to the Duke of Marlborough. It was the same in this parade. She deftly bolstered her unit by stealing a whole brigade of Swedes from Mrs. Blatch. She angrily turned on a tired patrolman, who wasn’t giving her girls enough marching room: “The police protection is most inadequate!”
But for once, someone was up to her. “Never mind, lady,” the officer replied. “Next year you’ll all be policemen.”
It certainly looked that way. The women stormed Carnegie Hall, where the march ended, and speaker after speaker promised the birth of a new era. When Mrs. Blatch was interrupted by a Tammany heckler (the only one who dared appear), the audience howled, “Eat him alive!”—and seemed to mean it. Other lady orators mounted soap boxes on almost every Broadway corner and harangued fascinated crowds far into the night.
“Woman suffrage marched yesterday in the most significant demonstration ever attempted by it in this country,” the World declared next morning. “The greatest demonstration of women in all American history,” proclaimed the Tribune. And all the papers noted the immense change in the crowd’s mood from a year ago. “The march stirred the minds of the beholders as no other pageant seen in the city streets has done,” the Press observed; “Manhattan was brought for the first time to a realization of the strength of the suffrage movement, its universality, and its grip on the minds of its adherents.”
Typical was the reaction of Inspector McCluskey, in charge of the police detail. The inspector was a seasoned veteran … he had seen lots of parades … he wasn’t moved easily. But now, surveying the yellow streamers, the confetti, the litter left in the wake of the march, he could only say, “It’s about time to give them the vote. I wish to God they would. I’d be with them.”
The opposition New York Times understood all too well. “The situation is dangerous,” the editor warned. “We often hear the remark nowadays that women will get the vote if they try hard enough and persistently; and it is true that they will get it, and play havoc with it for themselves and society, if the men are not firm and wise enough and—it may as well be said—masculine enough to prevent them.”
It was a voice from the grave. The day had passed for putting the issue in terms of masculinity. If the parade accomplished nothing else, it convinced people that the suffragists weren’t merely a band of hulking females trying to wear the pants in the family. The long ranks of shop girls, factory workers, nurses, clerks, artists, housewives—to say nothing of Inez Milholland—were proof enough of that.
This great mixture was important. For the affair also offered dramatic proof that suffrage wasn’t merely Society’s latest toy. “All classes of women were in that parade,” the Tribune pointed out. “This is the significant thing for politicians and ‘antis’ to stop and think about—that all classes are united in this fight for a principle.”
“The solidarity of womanhood,” Mrs. Blatch called it, and to the suffragists the thought carried far beyond the fight to get the vote. After that was won, the women would continue working together for a better, finer, more beautiful world. It never occurred to them that they might be absorbed into the Democratic and Republican parties. On the contrary, they would vote as a bloc. There would be Democrats, Republicans—and Women. In this alignment the women would hold the balance, always throwing their weight on the side of truth and light. United this way, there was no limit to the good they could do.
As a starter, they would end crooked politics. They were sure they could do it, although they admitted it would be a hard fight. “The lowest grade of politician,” explained Mrs. Laidlaw of the Suffrage Party, “the one who is on the side of graft and corruption, which he knows will end when the women vote, he’ll get into his war clothes and fight us harder than ever.” But the battle would continue until finally, as the writer Belle Squire put it, “the boss shall be no more.”
The knell would also sound for prostitution. “That is one question the women could settle if they had votes!” cried the Reverend Anna Garlin Spencer at the Carnegie Hall rally. Dr. Shaw had an even better idea: “If you want the ‘white slave’ traffic stopped in New York, give us a woman Police Commissioner.”
And all this was only the beginning. The women would close the saloons. They would stop government waste. They would introduce a new note of economy. (After all, the argument ran, government is just another form of housekeeping.) Best of all, they would end war—what woman would vote to send her son off to be shot?
And now it was all within their grasp. The parade left no doubt. Over 15,000 marchers, against a mere 3,000 last year; 500,000 cheering spectators, against an indifferent handful in 1911. Yes, that glorious afternoon made it clear that the battle would be won. Perhaps not this year … maybe not next … but it was coming, it was coming.
No wonder Mrs. Edith Seldon Rogers of the WPU felt so exalted: “Never was the outlook brighter for the welfare of humanity.” No wonder the women of Pittsburg, Kansas, chose such a special way to celebrate their victory the following November. When word spread that Kansas had definitely gone for suffrage, the ladies garnered around a great community bonfire. Then, at a given signal, they threw their old bonnets into the blaze. As the flames rolled skyward, all of them could plainly see the passing of the old and the coming of a golden new day.