Making a Spectacle of Suffrage: The National Woman Suffrage Pageant, 1913

On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, the National American Woman Suffrage Association sponsored the first national woman's suffrage pageant. Although public demonstrations for woman's suffrage had been part of the American suffragists agenda since 1910' (Bland, "Techniques" 26-30), the 1913 pageant was unprecedented in its scale-thousands of women from across the United States and of all ages and social classes marched through the capitol city demanding the vote-while the pageant itself was characterized by an elaborate combination of theatricality, allegory, decorative pictorial effect, and radical politics. Daring to make a spectacle of themselves, the organizers of and participants in the National Woman Suffrage Pageant stood completely outside of conventional standards of feminine behavior and propriety while negotiating new definitions and boundaries of women's roles in society. At the same time, the pageant betrayed the conflict within the suffrage movement itself between conciliatory and militant voices. Self-consciously positioned at the intersection of art and the production of meaning and the construction of femininity, the National Woman Suffrage Pageant of 1913 galvanized the highly charged current debates on the role of women and underscored the woman question, in capital letters, as a topical political issue. The decision to stage a suffrage pageant was not without precedent with respect both to the suffrage movement, which was enjoying a renewed vigor and militancy, and to the pageant craze which swept the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In fact, pageantry's mandate for social reform and optimistic belief in change through democratic cooperation reflected the confidence, positivism, and soaring rhetoric of civic idealism that characterized the Progressive Era. Between roughly 1905 and 1920, literally hundreds of pageants were staged in the United States-as one observer noted, "...the country's gone pageant mad" (Beard 239)with the overarching orientation toward social reform as their common denominator. Resonating with the rhetoric of civic idealism that characterized much of the Progressive Era, one contemporary observer declared pageantry "the greatest, most characteristic form of democratic art" (Rainwater 267, 281). In 1912, Percy MacKaye, one of the most active and outspoken proponents of the civic ideal in pageantry argued for pagentry as an "agency of civilization" in contemporary society in his 1912 book, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure: A Book of Suggestions. "Pageantry is poetry for the masses...[and due to its dedication] to civic education, [does] more than any other agency to provide popular symbolic form and tradition for the stuff of a noble national drama" (176-77). Moreover, MacKaye argued that pageants not be restricted solely to historic themes of the past but rather that "all vital modern forces and institutions of our nation...might appropriately find symbolic expression in majestic masques, educative and entertaining to all people" (176). In 1913, leading reformers and professional artists organized the American Pageant Association (APA) which attempted to promulgate standards for the new pageantry movement and sought to guide its development through publications, training programs, conferences, and even certification of pageant masters.2 The American Pageant Association Bulletin, published monthly between 1913 and 1916, included technical information and featured chronological lists of pageants sanctioned by the Association. A heady mix of idealism, patriotism, and belief in the power of pageantry to counteract the centrifugal forces of diverse and heterogeneous communities guided the American Pageant Association which flourished in the teens. Seeking to diminish the impact of dislocations and transformations brought about by industrialization, shifting roles of women, vigorous immigration, urbanization, among others, the APA sponsored pageants that gave tangible form to such intangible concepts as social cohesion, civic idealism, citizenship, and nationalism through organized and aestheticized rituals. …