Activism Then and Now: the 1913 Suffrage Parade and the 2017 Women’s March

In this article for USA Today, journalist Mary Bowerman uses the Women’s March—the feminist protest held in Washington, DC and other cities the day after Donald Trump’s January 20, 2017 inauguration—to highlight another massive march in the nation’s capitol: the March 3, 1913 parade for suffrage.

Bowerman writes:

The massive Women’s March on Washington isn’t the first time scores of women have banded together to send a message to a new president.

A little over 100 years ago, one day before the inauguration of President-elect Woodrow Wilson, women also took to the streets as part of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade. The women called on Wilson to implement a constitutional amendment that would guarantee women the right to vote, according to obamawhitehouse.gov.

The parade was held on March 3, 1913, and was organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Instead of pink caps worn by protestors in the Women’s March on Washington, women in 1913 wore wide-brimmed hats and carried flags.

Read the whole article for free here.

For more on the 1913 suffrage parade, see the book Seeing Suffrage: The 1913 Washington Suffrage Parade, Its Pictures, and Its Effects on the American Political Landscape; The Atlantic‘s Pictures of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, this academic article examining suffrage parades from 1910-1913, as well as this New York Tribune essay explaining why suffragists were parading, penned by Harriet Stanton Blatch (daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton).

Lesson Plan: The First Amendment and the Women’s Suffrage Movement

This teaching resource, put together by the Washington, DC-based Newseum, features a wealth of lesson plans and primary sources that can be used for students in grades six through 12.

The Newseum teacher’s resource includes access to newspapers, magazines, periodicals, photographs, and artifacts related to the American suffrage movement. The lesson plans all focus on how the women’s suffrage movement used the First Amendment’s five freedoms—speech, religion, press, petition, and assembly—to advance their cause.

This is an excerpt from the press release explaining the teaching resource:

The Newseum launched the latest component of its free Digital Classroom website, “Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less.” The new learning module builds on the site’s rich civil rights resources to include one of the largest online collections of primary sources and historic periodicals about the women’s suffrage movement. The new module, made possible by the generous support of AAUW, explores how the suffragists embraced the First Amendment as a tool to help achieve passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which gave women the right to vote.

The module draws on the wealth of resources maintained by the Newseum in its collection of historic artifacts and more than 35,000 newspapers and magazines. “Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less” features detailed images and descriptions of nearly 300 historic front pages, photographs and artifacts that illustrate how the suffragists used all five freedoms of the First Amendment—speech, religion, press, petition and assembly—to influence public opinion and win support. An interactive map of the United States pinpoints artifacts used to advocate for and against suffrage, and students can document their civic engagement using the latest Glogster EDU tools embedded in the site.

“Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less”—designed for students in grades six through 12—encourages a deeper understanding of the women’s suffrage movement that goes beyond the famous names and iconic images to reveal the roots of today’s social and political movements.

To gain access to the lesson plans and resources the Newseum offers, you have to sign up for a workshop at the Newseum itself. Information on how to do so can be found here.

Interested in other resources for educators? Click here to browse other Teaching Suffrage materials on Women’s Suffrage and the Media.

Digital Exhibit: Arkansas Women’s Suffrage Centennial

This virtual exhibit is part of the Arkansas Women’s Suffrage Centennial, a project that “commemorates the 100th anniversary of the right to vote for women in Arkansas by promoting events, encouraging research and education programs related to women’s suffrage, and helping to preserve the history of women’s suffrage within the state.”

The exhibit features a number of galleries, which include information as well as photographs and original documents from the suffrage era and focus on topics ranging from African-American suffragists to suffrage fashion.

Of particular interest is the exhibit’s media gallery, which features documents, cartoons, drawings, and photographs and includes this delightful suffrage fashion gallery.

The Husband-ist of a Suffragist and Other Parodies

As popular support for suffrage grew, the subject became ripe for satire. In this post, Brooke Kroeger, the author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, looks at how two publications, the Brooklyn Eagle and American Magazine, deployed satire when covering the suffrage movement.

The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper column made fun of the men who were increasingly coming to support the suffrage movement. Here’s an excerpt from the Eagle‘s “A Smile a Second” column, published on September 7, 1912:

D.T.B. writes: “My wife has been demanding the right to exercise the franchise so vehemently that I named our old horse The Franchise and told her to go exercise it. The temperature of our domicile has been slightly below zero ever since and I burned nine tons of coke last week trying to create a congenial atmosphere. Belonging to the Suffragents is too expensive for a man in my station in life. Please accept my resignation.”

The American Magazine piece poked fun at Chicago socialites who were coming out in support of women’s voting rights.

Digitized versions of both articles are available in the post on Kroeger’s website.

For more on satire and suffrage, check out Puck magazine’s satirical February 1915 issue on suffrage.

Video-Slideshow: Film’s Role in the British Suffrage Movement

British Film Institute Silent Film Curator Bryony Dixon created this slideshow, which combines text, still images, and video clips from the British suffrage movement, to celebrate the release of the 2015 film Suffragette.

The slideshow includes historical background on the push for women’s suffrage in the UK, but its particular focus is the way in which suffragettes used film—then a silent, nascent medium—to further their cause. As the BFI puts it, Dixon “explores how the BFI’s collections highlight the passion and media savvy of the suffragettes’ struggle, offering a fascinating portrait of British women during this time.”

Dixon examines more than just suffragettes’ use of film, however; she also looks at their portrayal in non-suffragist movies from the era, and the slideshow includes short clips of some of the most famous examples of suffrage in early film, making it a useful—if compact—primary-source guide.

The webpage also contains a short documentary video in which Dixon discusses similar topics.

Online Exhibit: “Rights for Women: The Suffrage Movement and its Leaders”

This online exhibit, “Rights for Women: The Suffrage Movement and its Leaders,” provides a detailed history of the the American women’s suffrage movement from the 1830s to the 1920s, curated by the National Women’s History Museum. Each section includes text descriptions, photographs, and scans of documents from the era. There are also numerous links to more detailed explanations of events, and profiles of important suffragist leaders. In addition, there is a useful list of links to additional resources.

The various sections of the exhibit are:

I. Introduction to the Movement
II. The Abolition Movement and Woman Suffrage
III. The Seneca Falls Convention and the Early Suffrage Movement
IV. Post-Civil War and the Emergence of Two Movements
V. 1869-1890: A Movement Divided
VI. The Movement Reunites
VII. African American Women and Suffrage 
VIII. A New Century: A Mass Movement 
IX. Women and the Trade Union Movement
X. The National American Woman Suffrage Association Reinvigorated
XI. Men Support the Woman Suffrage Movement
XII. The National American Woman Suffrage Association under Carrie Chapman Catt 
XIII. The Militant Women’s Movement
XIV. WWI and Winning the Vote
XV. Aftermath
XVI. List of Woman Suffrage Leaders
XVII. Suffrage Political Cartoons
XVIII. Did You Know? Facts About Woman Suffrage 
XIX. Other Resources

Video: “Celebrating 90 Years of Women’s Rights”

This video, Celebrating 90 Years of Women’s Rights, was created by the National Women’s History Museum to celebrate Women’s Equality Day 2010, the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s certification on August 26, 1920.

Using archive film footage and photographs, the video traces the struggle for women’s voting rights, beginning with the anti-abolitionist movement in the 1840s and culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Online Exhibit: Motherhood, Social Service and Political Reform: Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage

This online exhibit, “Motherhood, Social Service and Political Reform: Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage,” follows women’s long road to the vote, focusing on the “distinct female political culture and imagery” of the suffrage movement.

The exhibit allows you either to take an in-depth look at the history of women’s suffrage or to take a shorter tour through an image gallery. The in-depth journey provides commentary, photographs, and documents of the history of the movement, including an exploration of how themes of domestic life and motherhood were used to advance movement goals. The image gallery contains 50 images of pamphlets, posters, and other paraphernalia used to rally support for the movement.

An updated image exhibit, “Creating a Female Political Culture,” curated by Edith P. Mayo and the National Women’s History Museum and released in January 2017, presents many of the same images from the bigger exhibit in slideshow format, with a main image and detailed text description on each slide.

Vanity Fair Short Film: The 1910s—Women’s Suffrage and Equal Rights

This Vanity Fair  video by director Gilly Barnes is short—at just under four minutes, it’s closer in length to a film trailer than a typical documentary—but packs in a lot of information.

Part of the “1910s” portion of Vanity Fair‘s centennial “Decades Series,” the video combines suffrage-era primary sources like photos, quotes, and newspaper clippings with dramatic reenactments of a suffragist narrator explaining how she discovered the cause.

Though perhaps too condensed to be much use to viewers already steeped in the history of the American suffrage movement’s final decade, the video is a good introduction to the topic, and places it neatly within its historical context.

This description of the “Decades Series” comes from the project’s YouTube page:

Ten decades, 10 directors. In celebration of V.F.’s 100th anniversary, 10 eclectic filmmakers—from Judd Apatow to Don Cheadle to Brett Ratner—created a film on each era of V.F.’s century-old history and the Zeitgeist that defined it.

Teaching Guide: Scholastic’s Women’s Suffrage Unit

This teaching guide from Scholastic is designed to help elementary and middle school teachers plan and carry out lessons and assessments about women’s suffrage, both in the United States and internationally. It includes tips on everything from how to set up the classroom before lessons to recommendations for essays to assign, and how to grade them.

From the site:

Scholastic’s Women’s Suffrage unit allows your students to learn about the quest by women around the world to win the right to vote. Students will read background information while building their vocabulary skills. Students will also explore and analyze maps and dates as well as have a chance to make a personal connection by reading a firsthand account of a woman who voted for the first time in 1920.

The site has lesson plans tailored to various grade levels, from first grade through eighth.

The lessons on the site meet the following teaching standards: International Reading Association (IRA) standards; National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) standards; National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) standards; and Technology Foundation Standards for Students.

In addition to the site’s Teacher’s Guide section, there is also a page of activities for students to use during lessons. This consists of three main activities, whose descriptions come from the Scholastic site:

• History of Women’s Suffrage:

With Grolier Encyclopedia online, students read background articles related to the women’s suffrage movement. A list of vocabulary words used in each article accompanies the text. After reading the articles, students take an interactive quiz that tests them on content and vocabulary.

• When Did Women Vote?:

Using a printable chart as a guide, students explore two maps: one of the world and one of the United States. Clicking on different countries and different states, students get information on when women in that area won the right to vote. Filling out their chart, students are asked to draw conclusions about global patterns of women’s suffrage.

• One Woman Votes in 1920:

Effie Hobby was born in 1897 and was 23 years old in 1920, making her eligible to vote in the first U.S. presidential race. Students can follow Effie’s story and learn what it was like for her to win the right to vote. Students will also learn about events that occurred during Effie’s life.

Interested in other resources for educators? Click here to browse other Teaching Suffrage materials on Women’s Suffrage and the Media.