Women's Suffrage Movement and Inaugurations

The Woman Suffrage Procession along Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's presidential inauguration, used pageantry to raise awareness about women's exclusion from the nation's political process. The publicity following the event re-energized the woman suffrage movement in the United States.

On the afternoon of March 3, 1913, the day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson as the nation’s 28th president, thousands of suffragists gathered near the Garfield monument in front of the U.S. Capitol. Grand Marshal Jane Burleson stood ready to lead them out into Pennsylvania Avenue at exactly 3:00, in what became the first civil rights march on Washington, DC. It also proved to be turning point in the fight for the vote.

President-elect Woodrow Wilson’s train pulled into Washington’s Union Station on March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration. A relatively thin crowd greeted him and his family before a motorcade took them to a hotel. “Where are all the people?” Wilson asked as he peered out the car window. “On the Avenue, watching the suffrage parade.” Across town, Alice Paul was in the thick of that suffrage procession, an event she created, planned and executed.

On March 3, 1913, the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was in a Washington, D.C. drill rehearsal hall with sixty-four other Illinois suffragists. She was there representing the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC)-- which she had founded as the first black suffrage club in Chicago just two months before. Ida planned to march with the women in what promised to be a parade of unprecedented scale and significance.

In early March of 1913, 1,500 Boy Scouts from DC, Maryland, Georgia, New Jersey, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia traveled to Washington, DC. They were there to help the Inaugural Committee handle crowds in the nation’s capital during the inauguration of President-Elect Woodrow Wilson. On March 3, 1913, however, they found themselves keeping the peace and rendering aid at a very different event.

Victoria Clafin Woodhull was a writer, Wall Street broker, and women's rights activist who ran for President of the United States in 1872.

Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass (1874-1969) is an American Hero. She was likely the first African American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States. In 1952, she became the first African American woman nominated for Vice President.

Margaret Smith was the first woman to serve in both houses of the United States Congress and the first woman to represent Maine in either. In January 1964, Smith announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Although she was not selected as the Republican Party presidential candidate, she was the first woman in the United States to be in the running to be a major party’s presidential candidate.

The first Black woman elected to the United States Congress, Shirley Chisholm ran under the campaign slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed.” She represented New York’s 12th Congressional District from 1969 to 1983. On January 25, 1972 she announced her candidacy, becoming the first Black candidate for a major party’s nomination for President of the United States and the first woman to seek the Democratic Party nomination.