Men Invited to Join Pro-Suffrage Parade in NYC
Men were invited by suffragists to join their parade on this day, in support of women’s suffrage, which would be held on May 3 in New York City. (This march is not to be confused with the pro-suffrage march nearly two months earlier in Washington, D.C., on March 3, 1913.) Some men indicated that they would march with their wives. March organizers suggested that, for political effect, men march as a group.
There were pro-suffrage parades in New York City in 1911 and 1912 in addition to 1913.
The leader of both the New York City and Washington, DC, parades was Inez Milholland, one of the leading suffrage activists. She led the Washington, DC, parade riding on a white horse, wearing a white cape and a crown. Tragically, Milholland died of exhaustion as a result of a nearly month-long 2016 pro-suffrage speaking tour. She collapsed in the middle of her speech in Los Angeles on October 22nd, was hospitalized and died there on November 25, 1916.
The Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, (sometimes referred to as the Men’s League for Equal Suffrage) had been organized by the noted political activist and editor Max Eastman in late 1909. Eastman is most famous as the editor of The Masses, the most prominent anti-war magazine in the country after the U.S. entered World War I on April 6, 1917. As part of the wartime suppression of dissent, the U. S. Post Office declared The Masses unmailable in the summer of 1917 and it ceased publication. Max Eastman was the brother of Crystal Eastman, founder of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), which opposed U.S. entry into World War I, and then in 1917 the Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which in January 1920 was reorganized as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The year 1913 marked a new stage in the campaign for a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. A delegation of suffragists went to Washington, D.C. and met with the newly inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson. Later, in 1917, Alice Paul began an aggressive campaign of picketing the White House to demand a constitutional amendment (January 10, 1917). Paul was arrested in front of the White House on October 20, 1917, and, while incarcerated, went on a hunger strike.
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, and women voted in all state and federal elections, including the election for president, for the first time on November 2, 1920. Unfortunately, the Nineteenth Amendment did not protect the right of African American women to vote in states of the southeast where Jim Crow legislation enacted between 1890 and 1920 largely disenfranchised African American voters.
Watch a documentary on the 1913 suffrage march on Washington: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi3mxt1Xhyk
Read Alice Paul’s biography: Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (2010)
Learn more about the history of women’s suffrage, from the 19th Century to the present: Ellen Carol DuBois, Suffrage: Women: Long Battle for the Vote (2020)
Read Paul’s Oral History interview: http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6f59n89c/
And read Inez Milholland’s biography: Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (2016)