During this election year, after a primary season featuring Hillary Clinton the presidential contender and now Sarah Palin as a possible vice president, it’s worth remembering that before 1920, women weren’t even allowed to vote in all 50 states, much less run for office.
The suffrage movement remedied this. As a few states started granting women voting rights in the the early 1900s, suffragist leaders ramped up the issue by holding massive Fifth Avenue marches between 1910 and 1917, attracting tens of thousands of women.
This photo is undated, unfortunately, but it may have captured the 1915 parade, which featured suffragists on horseback. That year, 50,000 women marched from Washington Square to 59th Street.
A New York Times story about the 1915 parade notes that “Miss Leslie Johnson, who will lead the cavalry corps of the Women’s Political Union, has Titian hair and will ride a white horse.”
The Times seemed particularly enchanted by Miss Johnson. Under the story headline, the dek calls out “Titian-haired beauty on a milk-white palfrey to lead the cavalry brigade.”
Tags: 19th Amendment, Suffrage, Suffragette Parade
September 2, 2008 at 8:15 am |
Actually, women were allowed to run for office prior to the ratification of the 19th amendment. The first female member of Congress, Jeannette Rankin http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=r000055 was elected in 1917 as a Republican from Montana. She was a suffragette and a pacifist who voted against American involvement in WWI. Some states, like Washington, 1910, allowed women to vote in state-wide elections prior to 1920. Also, many of the 13 original colonies allowed women to vote as long as they were landowners. New Jersey was the last state to revoke this right in 1807. The fight for Woman’s suffrage was complex, and a lot of gains were made and then given up. http://dpsinfo.com/women/history/timeline.html