Suffragettes in the USA? Yes indeed.

Emmeline Pankhurst

August 11, 2020—An article last month in The New York Times leads off with a statement by Susan Ware that American suffragists never used the word "suffragette" in reference to themselves. It was used by "only their detractors." (Postscript, August 16, 2020: This statement was repeated on p. 8 of "How American Women Won the Right to Vote," a special section today of The New York Times.)

Susan Ware said (p. 9 of today's special section) she wrote to fellow Wellesley alumna Hilary Clinton to ask her not to call the women activists "suffragettes". Ware is both right and wrong.

Right, it was a British term. As Elaine Weiss notes in the conversation (p. 8 of today's special section), the word "suffragette" was initially used derisively, by journalist Charles Hands writing for the Daily Mail in 1906, to refer to the activist British women who followed Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and created the Woman's Social and Political Union (WSPU). It was nonetheless embraced by the WSPU, who pronounced the word suffragette with a hard "g" and said that suffragettes not only wanted the vote but would get it.

Right, it was considered by American suffragists to be incorrect. Most women working for the vote were lined up doing day-to-day advancement of Votes for Women with Carrie Chapman Catt via NAWSA (the merged post-Civil War woman suffrage group, the National American Woman Suffrage Association). They called themselves suffragists. They eschewed civil disobedience and disruption, which were techniques used by the WSPU. After President Wilson capitulated, the suffrage movement sought to moderate its militancy as the ratification process moved from state to state, and suffragist became the accepted term.

But... leaders of the National Woman's Party did call themselves suffragettes. Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Harriot Stanton Blatch and Inez Milholland Boissevain were all trained by the Pankhursts. Like the WSPU, they were critical of the slow rate of progress of traditional suffrage organizations in pursuing the vote. They were determined to be more activist and therefore embraced the term suffragettes.

When President Woodrow Wilson sarcastically rejected an appeal in January 1917 by a delegation from the National Woman's Party (NWP) to honor the 1916 death of Inez Milholland Boissevain and support the Anthony Amendment, the NWP initiated nonstop picketing of the White House. The picketers were arrested at the President's urging, and when they went on a hunger strike (in approved Pankhurst fashion) at the Occaquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia, they were force-fed. When word got out about the force-feeding of the women prisoners, public opinion shifted in favor of the activists. Wilson changed his mind and supported the Anthony Amendment, after which the House and Senate quickly passed the Amendment in May 1919. 

Votes for Women became U.S. law when the last needed state, Tennessee, ratified the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920. The amendment was certified by the Secretary of State on August 26, 1920. The New York Times awarded a gold pen to NAWSA and a silver inkstand to the NWP. You could say, the suffragists and the suffragettes won the vote together.

INEZ | 5B. Aug. 18 - Women Get the Vote [4]

Picketing Wilson's White House in 1917

On this date in 1920, 95 years ago, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, making it the law of the land.

The 19th Amendment extended the franchise to all women. Previously, some states allowed women to vote, but it was a state option.

Credit for being the state that put the Amendment over the top - 36 out of the 48 states were required - goes to Tennessee, although Connecticut was ready to vote in favor if Tennessee failed.

The so-called "Anthony Amendment", named after suffragist Susan B. Anthony, was first proposed in Congress in 1878, and in every subsequent Congress.

After Susan B. Anthony died in Rochester in 1906, young women feared that the Anthony Amendment might languish. New suffragist leaders emerged in women's colleges and some of them - including Alice Paul and Inez Milholland - trained with the suffragettes led by Mrs. Pankhurst in Britain.

Milholland energized Vassar students before her graduation in 1909. When she graduated, the harassed President, James Monroe Taylor, said to her father, John E. Milholland: "Wonderful girl. I'm glad she's gone."

In 1912 Milholland led on horseback a suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue in New York. In 1913 she led on horseback a parade from the Capitol to the White House. Three years later she campaigned against Woodrow Wilson on a single issue - his not supporting the Anthony Amendment.

Milholland died during her campaign of "pernicious anemia" - what we would diagnose today as a Vitamin B12 deficiency. She collapsed while giving a speech against Wilson in Los Angeles. She died six weeks later.

A delegation of women visited Wilson in January 1917, and he ridiculed their appeal to him in the name of Milholland's death, saying they were ignorant of politics. The women from the National Woman's Party immediately started a non-stop picket of the White House. Eventually, the District of Columbia police arrested the picketers and they were taken to a Lorton, Md. workhouse for women. There they began a hunger strike. The news reports gradually changed public opinion in favor of suffrage.

Worn down by the pickets and World War I, Wilson finally got behind the Anthony Amendment and in 1919 it narrowly passed both houses of Congress. Most Southern states opposed the amendment, and on August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature was in line to be the last needed state to ratify the Amendment.

The suffragists wore yellow roses in their lapels, and the anti-suffragists wore red American Beauty roses. The state legislature was tied 48 to 48. Only one legislator was undecided, 24-year-old Harry Burn, the youngest. He had been expected to vote against it, but he had in his pocket a note from his mother, which read:

Dear Son: Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don't keep them in doubt. I noticed some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet. Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification. Your Mother.

He voted in favor and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution became law.

INEZ | Washington March, 2013 – The Deltas

March 3, 1913–Suffragist Parade. It was a Monday, the day
before President Wilson's first inauguration. Photo: Library of Congress.

I am back home in New York City from the centennial of the famed suffrage march in 1913, on the eve of the President Wilson's swearing-in.

It was on Monday, March 3, 1913.

The 1913 and 2013 parades were very different...

In 1913, It Became a Riot. Back then, the parade of women was huge for the time. The NY Times said 5,000 marchers; the National Park Service reported 8,000. It was the first major public demonstration in Washington. The 500,000 onlookers, mostly men, jeered the women as they went by. The parade devolved into a riot.

New Yorker Inez Milholland was on horseback at the front, and she pushed the edge of the crowd back with her horse. But behind her, push came to shove and the DC police couldn't keep order - some believe they didn't try. Secretary of War Stimson ordered cavalry in from Fort Myer to calm things down, but by the time the military arrived hundreds of women were injured. The marchers were protected by the First Amendment, but not by the police. The police superintendent was later cross-examined by Congress and was relieved of his job.

On March 2, 2013, a National Park Service Ranger tells
how the National Woman's Party met in 2017 with Pres.
Wilson to ask for support of Votes for Women, in the
name of Inez Milholland Boissevain, who died in Nov.
1916. Wilson ridiculed the women. Photo by JT Marlin. 

Back Story: Black Sorority Excluded. During the weeks before the parade, the participation of  black women in general was a thorny issue for Alice Paul. Later in life, she described this issue as her main preoccupation at the time.

To be specific, a new breakaway sorority at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta, demanded that it have a place in the parade. The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority's leadership at Howard University had decided to break away from the socially ambitious club to form a new sorority that would be more socially activist.

These 22 Delta women wanted to march in the NAWSA parade. Alice Paul feared that participation by black women in still-segregated Washington would end the participation in the parade of the southern chapters of NAWSA and destroy NAWSA's unity.

Alice Paul was in charge of the "Congressional Committee" of NAWSA in 1912 after working for the British suffragettes. She started recruiting new people and raising money, much of it in New York City where NAWSA was then based. She tried to hold together the fragile coalition for a Federal Amendment for Votes for Women.

Inez Milholland disagreed on excluding the black sorority. She was the daughter of the first Treasurer of the NAACP, John E. Milholland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian who clung to the Lincoln Republican ethos of supporting equality among the races. She was adamant that the Deltas should be given their place, and allowed to march, in the parade lineup. She threatened to withdraw her commitment to lead the Washington parade on horseback. She had led the New York suffrage parade on horseback to great applause in New York City – it was a media attraction. She was also well connected with NAWSA supporters like Alva Belmont in New York City.

Alice Paul grudgingly agreed to allow the Howard University Deltas to join the parade. But she also had a plan, which appears not to have been shared with Inez Milholland, to minimize the danger to the parade by putting all the black women at the end of the parade, after the Men's League for Woman Suffrage.

It may be hard for some to appreciate how low the status of black women was in the Washington 100 years ago – or how threatened some white people were by signs of electoral activism. The outcome of the Civil War was to enfranchise black men. But the federal law was undermined by Jim Crow laws passed in southern states designed to suppress the black vote as well as the votes of some less-educated white men. For advocates of Votes for Women, seeing black women marching in a parade would remind southerners that adding women voters would double the number of potential black voters.

Contemporary accounts say that Alice Paul and the Congressional Committee leadership were  worried that a visible black presence in the parade would set back progress toward a federal amendment. They may have foreseen that including black women in the parade would add to the potential for the violent reaction that actually occurred. Suffragist Mary Church Terrell reported that the Delta marchers were required to assemble in a segregated area. It was her opinion that:

If [Paul] and other white suffragist leaders could get the Anthony Amendment through without enfranchising African American women, they would do so.

Linda Lumsden's biography of Inez Milholland makes clear that however much Inez may have gone along with excluding blacks in other social contexts, she was firm about the participation of the Deltas.  Milholland was, like her father, a member of the NAACP. Citing Mary Church Terrell again, Lumsden says that Milholland insisted that the Howard contingent be allowed to march in the college section. Emmett Scott, secretary-treasurer of Howard University, said that Milholland

was unwilling to participate in a parade symbolizing a movement which was not big enough or broad enough to live up to the principles for which it was contending. (Lumsden, Inez, p. 91.)

On the day of the parade, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a former slave who had become a leading suffragist, defied the ruling of the Congressional Committee and marched with her Chicago NAWSA delegation. Others followed suit. In the end, 22 women marched in the Delta contingent and an unknown number of black NAWSA delegates marched with their geographical groups. But the only black organization to march as a group in the parade was the Howard delegation of Deltas! If 250 black women altogether were in the march – probably too high an estimate – and we use the lower NY Times estimate of the number of marchers, it means black marchers were at most 5 percent of the total.

The Deltas listen to their leaders talk about the Deltas' mission,
 "public service" and "social activism." Photo by JT Marlin.

The 2013 March Reversed the Racial Balance. The March 3, 2013 march was a totally different affair. This time, the newly born, tiny Deltas were now the main organizer of the event. They have grown into an army of 300,000 black women world-wide.

For the 100th anniversary march, Delta Sigma Theta reported 20,000 marchers signed up to be in Washington for the parade. The National Park Service posted a crowd estimate of 20,000-25,000.

My estimate is that fewer than 1,000 of the marchers were white men and women. The racial percentages were therefore exactly reversed. In 1913, at most 5 percent of the marchers were black. In 2013, at most 5 percent were white.

Looking Forward, Not Back. Another major difference in 2013 is in the nature of the participation of the Deltas and the other women's groups.

• The traditional women's groups, mostly white women, were commemorating the actions of the suffragists to obtain the vote. They dressed up in the costumes of 1913 with purple, gold and white sashes and dresses. Although the picketing of the White House did not start until January 1917, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial group had an effective tableau in place on March 2, 2013 showing the Silent Sentinels in front of the White House. When the demonstrators were arrested by the DC Police, Inez Milholland's sister Vida was one of those arrested, on July 4, 1917. They were taken away to the Occaquam workhouse in Lorton, Va., as described by a National Park Service Ranger who gave the history of woman suffrage in the United States while engaging the audience in some effective role playing (see second photo above).
• For the Deltas, the parade was less about history and pageantry and more about the next phase of the women's movement. Those Deltas marched with a purpose, every one of them dressed in their red and white colors, and the speeches in front of the Capitol (see bottom photo) were about moving on to new challenges, using their vote to attack continuing abuse of women in the home or in the workplace.

Meaning of the 2013 Parade. The 2013 Centennial parade was scheduled to start at 9:30 am on Sunday but by the time the Deltas who had assembled at the foot of the Capitol were emptied out and other groups started to march it was 10:45 am. The women's groups were there, some in suffragist costume. The traditional women's groups were relatively few in number, several dozen each at most from the League of Women Voters (successor to NAWSA), the National Woman's Party/Sewall-Belmont House and Museum (successor to the breakaway Congressional Committee of NAWSA), the National Organization of Women, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Committee and ERA of New Jersey.

There was no rioting – far from it! It was an eerily quiet Sunday morning. The Deltas are all business. They didn't bring any marching bands, which explains why the crowds were thin. Since Washington, DC workers now mostly live in suburban Maryland and Virginia, there were few onlookers, maybe 5,000 at most. Protest marches in Washington are now a regular occurrence. The Deltas were in D.C. in January and will be back in a couple of months.

Inez Milholland's insistence that the Deltas be allowed to march took on more significance for me as I watched an hour-long parade of the sorority's many chapters go by. Inez knew which way the winds were blowing. For the Deltas in 2013:

• The purpose of most of the marchers, and the meaning of the event, was not so much a memorial to the achievements of yesterday.
• Rather, it was a reaffirmation of what the original marchers believed in. Progress has been achieved – that is obvious – since the first parade. But the Deltas marched not so much out of reverence for the past as out of determination to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

[I have written a longer post putting the two marches in a more complete historical context. I have long been fascinated by the story because Inez Milholland married my mother's uncle, Eugen Boissevain.]

INEZ | Her Herald Uniform 1913 (Update Aug. 5, 2016)

1. Alice Paul's idea of Inez Milholland's
1913 costume as the Herald. The trumpet
was a non-starter; hard to handle that and
the horse at the same time.

The Woman Suffrage "Procession" was scheduled on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's first inauguration, on March 2, 1913.

Alice Paul, on behalf of the newly formed Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), asked Inez to lead the parade.

The Congressional Committee the following month, emboldened by the success of the parade, became the Congressional Union. In 1916 this entity, with significant new funding, became the National Woman's Party.

Alice Paul asked Inez to be a Herald and wear a uniform emblazoned with the three colors of the suffrage movement – gold, white and purple (in heraldic lingo – or, argent and purpure).

These are the colors that Inez is shown wearing on the flyers about the parade.

2. Inez Milholland on "Gray Dawn" (loaned by
Mr. A. D. Addison of Washington) at the
start of the parade. Photo: Library of Congress.

But Inez decided that an all-white–or, in The New York Times account, a pale blue–cloak looked better. Alice Paul was unhappy about it, but what could she do?

The white uniform was a success. The day after the parade, the N Y Times story devoted its early paragraphs to Inez's striking appearance at the head of the parade.

Later in the story, we are told that the event was marred by violence – the D.C. police were unable or unwilling to keep order, and cavalry from Fort Myer, Va. had to be brought in to keep the peace.

The Washington Post called Inez "the most beautiful suffragette" (this source also has a great collection of postcard photos of the parade).

What do you think? Photos of the actual event show Inez like a clothed Lady Godiva – white gown on a white horse.

The iconic poster of Inez, 1923 for the
 "Forward into Light" pageant at
Meadowmount, Lewis, N.Y.

One of those photos served as the image used to create the iconic posthumous portrait of Inez on a horse. For decades until 2011 it hung over the mantelpiece in the Sewall-Belmont House, now renamed the Belmont-Paul National Monument,  in Washington. (The mantelpiece was removed because of chimney leaks.)

The iconic painting was in bad condition and was carefully restored with the assistance of a Committee headed by Al Boissevain and Allegra Milholland.

The poster made from the painting inspired the National Woman's Party picketers and hunger strikers.

When Inez was married in July 1913, the New York Times expressed regret that a Hollander with a French name (Boissevain) had nabbed Milholland, the daughter of a Scotch Irish man (the family name Milholland is an Anglo-Irish transliteration of a Gaelic word meaning Follower of St. Chulann).

The Times described Inez as "the Fairest of the Amazons".

Related Posts: Suffrage Play June 11, 2017 in Vienna, Va.
Inez Milholland's Faceted Star Crown-Helmet, 1911