Today in 1915: NYC Suffrage Parade Expected to Include 45K+ Supporters

[niyad]

Today in 1915: NYC Suffrage Parade Expected to Include 45K+ Supporters




October 22, 1915: The rapidly rising tide of support for woman suffrage will make tomorrow’s parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue even more spectacular than any before it if most of the 47,230 people who have signed pledges to march take part. That stunning number was released today by organizers, and it means that the incredible growth of suffrage parades continues.

On February 16, 1908, it was big news when about two dozen members of the Progressive Woman Suffrage Union defied propriety – and police – by marching down Broadway in the city’s first unofficial suffrage parade. Two years later, Harriot Stanton Blatch, head of what was then called the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, called for another march, despite the opposition of conservative suffragists who warned that such a spectacle would “set suffrage back 50 years.” This time 400 women, carrying numerous banners, were applauded by several thousand spectators.

The 1910 event generated such huge amounts of favorable publicity that it was decided to have such a march every year, and soon even those who had been the most skeptical in the beginning were now taking part. In 1911, four thousand marched, and then the number increased to somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand in 1912. A 1913 march in Washington, D.C., was a true milestone event (even if repeatedly disrupted by rowdy crowds) and in New York, thirty thousand marched down Fifth Avenue that year.

By last year, there were coordinated marches all across the country, with the total number of participants as uncountable as the newspaper and magazine articles generated.
But while big suffrage parades have now become a tradition, there has never been anything quite like this, and there will be non-stop activity at all the suffrage groups’ headquarters until sometime tomorrow night when the last marcher finishes the route. It’s not just a matter of getting a lot of people to walk down a street. What’s hard is to get them to march in an occupational, organizational or geographic group, and in many cases in a costume symbolizing it. There are also large banners still being made, floats being decorated, bands rehearsing, and automobiles being tuned.

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http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2014/10/22/today-in-1915-nyc-suffrage-parade-expected-to-include-45k-supporters/

[niyad]

1. can you imagine any of the pukes in today's congress doing this??

In Washington, D.C., the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage announced that the Susan B. Anthony (nationwide woman suffrage) Amendment would be re-introduced on December 6th. Representative Frank Mondell, Republican of Wyoming and Senator George Sutherland, Republican of Utah, will do the honors. Senator Sutherland seemed especially supportive: