To the Streets

By 1910, according to Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, the national suffrage organizations had lost whatever momentum they had once had. Frustrated by these national groups, Harriot Stanton Blatchand other women looked for new ways to attract attention to the suffrage cause. Learning from the concurrent English suffrage movement, Blatch saw the importance of public spectacle and formed the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later known as the Equality League.

        Flexner and Fitzpatrick write, "It was Mrs. Blatch's organization which deserves credit for initiating the parades which became so successful a form of suffrage agitation that the alarm with which they were viewed at first soon seemed incomprehensible. . . [W]ithin a year or two parades had become so respectable that even a Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont was in line, and other cities were trying out the idea." From Century of Struggle, 246.

    See this page to learn more about how people on both sides of the suffrage issues used parades as political vehicles.