Postcard From a Woman Suffrage Parade

Postcard from Woman Suffrage Parade, 1913

This Smithsonian Snapshot celebrates Women’s History Month with a postcard from the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade. 

On March 3, 1913, 5,000 women marched up Pennsylvania Avenue demanding the right to vote. Their “national procession,” staged the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration, was the first civil rights parade to use the nation’s capital as a backdrop, underscoring the national importance of their cause and women’s identity as American citizens.

The event brought women from around the country to Washington in a show of strength and determination to obtain the ballot. The extravagant parade—and the near riot that almost destroyed it—kept woman suffrage in the newspapers for weeks.

This postcard is in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.