- Page 386 →This suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue in New York City on November 1, 1915, was one of many organized by the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later called the Women’s Political Union). Although such mass demonstrations departed from the usual demure organizing style of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, they attracted suffragists of all political stripes, from Socialist to mainstream. Despite the predominance of bourgeois values in the suffrage movement, epitomized by signs like the one carried here by Jewish suffragist Jane Schneiderman (on the right), many working-class women supported the principles of suffrage. They viewed the vote as a vehicle to address the ills of industrial life and the special needs of working-class women. After 1914, the Socialist Party prohibited suffrage work as part of a capitalist conspiracy against the working class. Still, many Socialist women who were also committed feminists and suffragists defied the ban by joining the Equality League in this march. Prominent League members included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Kelley, Lavinia Dock, and Inez Milholland.
|