Women voting: It was her dream. It was also the unfulfilled promise of America’s founding principles. 

On March 3, 1913 — the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration — Alice Paul organized the first political march in the nation’s capital. 

“What politicians had not been able to get through their minds, we would give them through their eyes — often a powerful substitute,” Doris Stevens recalled. 

But the parade did not go as planned. A crowd of unruly spectators besieged the 5,000 suffrage marchers. 

“Women were spit upon, slapped in the face, tripped up, pelted with burning cigar stubs,” the Woman’s Journal reported. Toward the rear, male supporters proudly marched under a banner that bore the words of Lincoln: “No country can exist half slave and half free.” They, too, were surrounded and jeered. 

Horses struggled to pull carts carrying floats and banners. We demand an amendment enfranchising women, one banner declared. Ambulances and emergency workers “came and went constantly for six hours.” One hundred were injured, though none seriously. Paul tried to push the crowd back but to no avail. The police watched on, some cheering on the rabble. Ultimately, the U.S. cavalry had to restore order. “I did not know men could be such fiends,” one marcher lamented. 

Paul’s parade was a disaster. Still, it served a purpose: It awakened the nation to longstanding injustice. “Now, in our valley of shadow,” Mary Johnston said, “the dawn begins to break.” And so it would. Just not yet. 

Four years later, Alice Paul sat shivering and starving in her cell at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. She and her not-so-silent sentinels had been arrested for picketing the White House fence. Jailed, Paul went on a hunger strike; she was held down by guards and brutally force-fed with a tube shoved up her nose and down her stomach. “Miss Paul vomits much,” one prisoner wrote. Some women were choked, others beaten; one suffered a heart attack. November 14, 1917, was aptly named the “Night of Terror.”  

In time, Paul’s strategy of direct confrontation paid off. One year later, Woodrow Wilson, the man who once paid little mind to Paul’s antics, stood before the Senate and asked for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as an urgent “war measure.” The Senate vote came up short. But a year later, Congress finally capitulated, and on June 4, 1919, the amendment passed. 

Winning the states was as difficult as winning Wilson and Congress. But Paul worked tirelessly to reach the finish line, raising money, writing letters, making calls, and lobbying governors and legislators. 

Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin came first. On June 28, Texas was the first Southern state to ratify; Georgia voted against a month later, the first state to do so. But the momentum was in suffrage’s favor. 

On the warm summer day of August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, and equal suffrage was enshrined in the Constitution. “A tremendous burst of applause followed the vote,” the Chattanooga News wrote. It was the end of a long struggle, one that, as Paul optimistically said, “completes the political democracy of America.” Tacie, Paul’s mother, told her diary: “Alice at last saw her dream realized.”

She had fought for a central and timeless principle of the Declaration of Independence: the consent of the governed. But the victory was not complete. For Black women, the Nineteenth Amendment was the beginning, not the end, of a long struggle; Jim Crowism in the South whittled down the meaning of equal suffrage until it was meaningless. 

Paul herself thought more needed to be done. In 1923, she proposed the Equal Rights Amendment, hoping to further codify equal treatment under the law — a task still unfulfilled. 

Six years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta. He, too, had a dream — that America would “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed” and “make real the promises of democracy.”

For Paul, as for King, the American Revolution was a constant struggle, always a beginning rather than an end. The task, in Tennyson’s words: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 

And so they did. And so must we.

Dakoda Pettigrew is a summa cum laude graduate of Liberty University with a Bachelor’s of science in political science and history. Pettigrew’s father went to school in Cassville, and he lives in Tennessee. He can be reached at [email protected].