The first time women marched on Washington, they were beaten and hospitalized

On a cold day in early March 1913, 27-year-old Inez Milholland sat placidly astride her horse, Gray Dawn, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Her long, dark hair descended down her back in loose curls, contrasting starkly with the bright white cape she wore. Milholland, a labor lawyer and outspoken advocate for women’s rights, was set to lead the Women’s Suffrage Procession, a massive march for the vote on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The event was spearheaded by tireless suffragist Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party.

“Women Start Invasion,” read the New York Times headline a day earlier. It wasn’t an exaggeration. Women had descended upon the capital in droves. A few arrived exhausted after a 230-mile Suffrage Hike from New York City led by General Rosalie Jones that had attracted a great deal of publicity. Others came by sea from countries that had already granted women the vote; those women were granted a privileged place at the front of the procession. Behind them were the “Pioneers,” women who’d long been working for the cause. Then came sections that “celebrated working women, who were grouped by occupation and wearing appropriate garb — nurses in uniform, women farmers, homemakers, women doctors and pharmacists, actresses, librarians, college women in academic gowns.” There were also delegations representing each state. And, to the consternation of some southern women and plenty of local racists, a group of African-American women marched too. Their participation was complicated by a recent spike in already-pervasive racist sentiment in DC following a rape allegedly committed by a black man. Alice Paul even recommended segregating the parade to placate onlookers. But African-American journalist Ida B. Wells refused to participate unless she could march under her state’s banner, and she walked with the Illinois delegation. Muckraking journalist Nellie Bly covered the event and gave her story the baldly provocative headline, “Suffragists Are Men’s Superiors.”

The march drew upwards of 5,000 women (8,000 by some counts), and included nine bands, four mounted brigades, 20 floats, and an allegorical theater performance near the Treasury Building. The event was meticulously coordinated and intended to attract the attention of onlookers—and especially, the press. In terms of attracting the public gaze, it was certainly successful: when president elect Wilson arrived at Union Station that day, the crowd there to greet him was far thinner than he’d imagined. A member of his staff asked, “Where are all the people?”

“Watching the suffrage parade,” a police officer told him.

The surviving images of the day have taken their place in the visual canon of American history. They are triumphant photographs depicting an orderly gathering of dignified and determined women in stiff dresses with gardenias pinned to their lapels, some adorned with Votes for Women sashes. But most of these capture only the peaceful beginning of the procession. Largely left out of the frame is the violence and humiliation to which marchers were subjected.

Up to 10,000 people looked on as the women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, most of them men in town for the inauguration. The crowd — including, by most accounts, many drunk men — surged toward the procession at many points, and women were harassed, called names, grabbed, tripped, shoved, and otherwise assaulted.

According to a witness, two ambulances “came and went constantly for six hours, always impeded and at times actually opposed, so that [the] doctor and driver literally had to fight their way to give succor to the injured.” By the end of the day, at least 100 marchers had been hospitalized. The New York Evening Herald wrote “Mob Hurts 300 Suffragists at Capital Parade.”

Though the District of Columbia police had been instructed to “give every instruction to protect those comprising the parade against embarrassments and afford them every security,” they did virtually nothing to help. “There would be nothing like this happen if you would stay at home,” one cop told a woman who had been attacked.

So badly did the police fail at protecting female marchers that Congress convened a special session days later to review their actions. Following days of eyewitness testimony, the chief of police was dismissed.

As Joan Wages, president and chief executive of the National Women’s History Museum, told the Washington Post, “history textbooks still say that women were ‘given’ the vote in 1920,” as though it was a gift, and passively received. In reality, women’s suffrage was the culmination of a frequently harrowing and occasionally violent 72-year struggle. And in so many ways, securing the right to vote was not an end point. It was just the beginning.

The day after the procession, Wilson delivered his inaugural remarks to a solemn crowd, making no mention of the dramatic events of the previous day. “Nowhere else in the world,” he said in his address, “have noble men and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope.”

Alice Paul and four of her colleagues met with President Wilson shortly after his inauguration to press him to publicly declare his support for the cause of suffrage, but the president did not formally advocate for suffrage until 1918, when American participation in World War I forced the issue. It would be another seven years after the march before Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote.

Inez Milholland, the regal young suffragette on the horse, died at age 30, reportedly soon after a long speaking tour during which she gave nearly 50 speeches about women’s rights and frequently fainted from anemia and exhaustion. She was described by by the Philadelphia Public Lodger as a woman who “embodied all the things which make the Suffrage Movement something more than a fight to vote. She meant the determination of modern women to live a full free life, unhampered by tradition.”

The young activist’s last public words were, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”

Indeed.