The 1910s are a fascinating period in women’s history. For upper class women, the Gilded Age was getting rusty, and many women gleefully discarded the societal rules which had previously governed every aspect of their lives. For lower class women, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 galvanzied action to unionize and organize. Remember how horrified we were by the fall of the Twin Towers? Witnesses to this horror must have felt much the same way. One hundred forty six workers died in this fire, most of them, women and girls. 

In between the rich women and the poor were the intellectuals, the artists, the activists, and the professional women, all striving for equality in a world where they weren’t even allowed to vote.

One of the aspects of women’s changing roles that I incorporated into The Whispering Women, the first book of my series, is the push for suffrage, especially by women of privilege. In this effort, they were joined by women of all classes. In Gilded Suffragists, Johanna Neuman documents the role of New York socialites in employing their wealth and leveraging “their social celebrity for the right to vote, seeking the political power of their class that was denied them because of the gender.”

This push for suffrage resulted in the Women’s March of 1913 in Washington D.C., two days before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration when 5,000 women confronted about a quarter of a million spectators. Police stood by as the crowd of mostly men jeered at the women and even physically attacked them. The sympathetic press the suffragists received as a result of this abuse only helped their cause.

In researching the Women’s March of 1913, I came across two novels on the topic: The Accidental Suffragist by Galia Gichon (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing) and The Women’s March: A Novel Of The 1913 Women Suffrage Procession by Jennifer Chiaverini (HarperCollins). The first is about a woman from the tenements who gets swept up in the cause of suffrage after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

The second book focuses on three historic figures in the fight for women’s suffrage: Alice Paul, Ida Wells Barnett, and Maud Malone.

Although they are written as novels, both books provide a wealth of information about the women who conceived of and organized the 1913 march as well as plenty of historical details to give you a real sense of what it was like to be fighting for the right to vote, all while being beaten, groped, and mocked.

A great source for background on the suffrage movement is the Hilary Swank movie, Iron-Jawed Angels, which is more about the horrors perpetrated on the women hunger strikers when they were thrown in jail for protesting, but it gives a vivid sense of these women and their passion for suffrage.

I also read quite a few nonfiction accounts on the Internet, but what really gave me a sense for the feel of the march was participating in the Women’s March on Washington in 2017. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of being surrounded by a huge number of people — all so different, different ages, different ethnicities, different genders and sexual preferences — all voicing a demand for peace, for respect, and for recognition.

The Women’s March of 1913 was not so large and perhaps not so diverse, and yet those marchers also came from different classes, different educational and work backgrounds, and different religious belief systems. There were Black women and White women, society women and domestic workers, marching together — if not always side by side. Regardless of their origins and their backgrounds, a shared passion united the marchers.

As always, feel free to email me with any questions or comments.