Twenty-Five Thousand Women Marched Up Fifth Avenue
On October 23, 1915, tens of thousands of marchers filled New York's Fifth Avenue in the largest women's suffrage parade the nation had ever seen.
At 3 o'clock on the afternoon of October 23, 1915, Fifth Avenue belonged to the women. Tens of thousands of them — estimates ran from 25,000 to 60,000 — stepped off from Washington Square and marched up the grandest boulevard in America in a river of white dresses, yellow sashes, and hand-lettered banners. It was the largest women's suffrage parade the nation had ever seen, and for one long afternoon, the question of whether women should vote was impossible to ignore.
The parade had been organized as a show of force ahead of a November 2 referendum on women's suffrage in New York State. Fifteen hundred police officers lined the route to hold back the crowds of spectators. Grand Marshal Ethel Stebbins led the procession, followed by a military band, and behind them came delegation after delegation: the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, carrying a banner that read 'REYKJAVIC VOTES; WHY NOT NEW YORK?'; the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, marching in cap and gown behind the national association's banner to the first great roar of applause; a plucky New Jersey delegation holding a banner that read 'NEW JERSEY: DELAYED BUT NOT DEFEATED' — their own referendum had failed just four days earlier.
The teachers were among the largest contingents, some in dark suits with yellow sashes, others in academic gowns, carrying the banner 'YOU TRUST US WITH THE CHILDREN; TRUST US WITH THE VOTE.' Seventy-four women rode on horseback. Floats rolled past, bands played, and men marched too. The New York Times reported marchers 'of all ages, from veterans in their seventies to babies pushed along in gocarts.' The last marchers did not pass the reviewing stand at the Public Library until after seven in the evening — more than four hours after the first.
The Times counted just under 26,000 marchers; the police chief estimated as many as 60,000; anti-suffrage leaders allowed barely 25,000. Whatever the true number, the spectacle did not win the referendum. On November 2, New York's male voters rejected women's suffrage. But the parade had shown the movement's discipline and scale, and the tide was turning: New York women won the vote in 1917, and three years later the 19th Amendment wrote it into the Constitution for the nation.
The women of Fifth Avenue lost the vote that November — and won the argument that mattered.
No public-domain photograph of the 1915 parade could be verified at a usable size, so this story is published without an image.
