Hiking had become an established form of suffrage protest since December 16, 1912, when a band of 200 women — again headed by General Rosalie Jones — started out from New York City for Albany, the state capital. The women staged meetings along the 170-mile route beside the Hudson River. It was a 13-day ordeal that many consider the first such protest hike for any cause.

Despite the hardships of that winter walk, the women kept up their spirits with chants and songs. One example went:

First aid is alright for our bruises small,
But nothing will cure us but votes for all! ¹

For more about this hike, go here.

It’s estimated that about two dozen women began the New York to Washington hike. In addition to Phoebe Hawn, Rosalie Jones, Ida Craft and Elizabeth Freeman, I’ve identified the following hikers: Elizabeth Aldrich, Flora Cornelia Allyn, Marie Elizabeth Baird, Helen Bergmark (who attracted the unwanted attention of a teenage miscreant named Roy B. Trolson), Louise Boldt (who also caught the eye of many a young gent although she was married), Catherine Burns, Alice Clark, Minerva Crowell, Lavinia Dock (a nurse who was dubbed the “Surgeon General” of the hike), Elizabeth Foley, Celia Gaffney, Hettie Wright Graham, Martha Klatschen, Constance D. Leupp (an outspoken advocate for working women), Mrs. Johannes Meyer, Mary “May Belle” Morgan, Augusta Richter, Olive Schultz and Mrs. George Wendt. Perhaps just 13 of the original band made it to Washington, although it’s hard to say, as women joined and dropped out at many points along the route. Mrs. Wendt’s 21-year-old son, George, accompanied the women as a bugler and Professor George Pryor Newman, a traveling lecturer, was a passenger in the scout car driven by Olive Schultz.

In fact, many men walked along with the women, at least for short stretches of the hike. One man, Ernest A. Stephens of Philadelphia, wrote a suffrage song, which he sang to the tune of “Home Sweet Home” as the women walked from Princeton to Philadelphia. One verse is as follows:

It’s a walk from “York” to Washington,
For a cause that’s right, we feel;
Through Jersey, Penn and Wilmington,
For your rights and a square deal.²

All of the women who undertook the hike were white women. The suffrage movement was marred by racial bias almost from its very beginning in the 1800s. When the suffrage hikers on this march reached Laurel, Maryland, the question was put to Rosalie Jones whether Black women would be allowed to hike along, if they chose. “Yes, they will!” she declared definitely. The New York Times reported what happened next: “In an unobtrusive way, four or five colored women with a fair imitation of a suffrage flag trailed along behind the hikers for a few hundred yards as they passed through one hamlet today, making it seem likely that the color question would have to be answered shortly.” ³

Unfortunately, the question was not answered. It surfaced again as an issue in the March 3d suffrage parade in Washington. Well in advance, Black women’s organizations had requested permission to participate, but the organizer, Alice Paul of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's (NAWSA's) Congressional Union, put them off by simply not answering their letters. She didn’t want the issue of race to compete with the suffrage cause. She may have been racist, but being raised a in a Quaker family and instilled with a belief in the equality of all people, it’s more likely that she was being pragmatic. She knew that Southern states would likely not vote for a federal amendment if they saw Black and white women working and walking together. In fact, it was women in Washington, D.C., a city below the Mason-Dixon line, who urged parade organizers to segregate Black women from their delegations and form a separate delegation. Although there is no record of the final discussions regarding race, Black women were confused as to where they were to march.

One woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the well-known journalist and anti-lynching activist, made a bold statement about where Black women belonged. When the parade started, her friends couldn’t find her, and they thought she’d gone back home to Chicago in anger. But at one point along Pennsylvania Avenue, she jumped out from the crowd and joined the all-white Illinois delegation.

Well-known Black suffrage leader Mary Church Terrell, who was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a speaker welcomed by both Black and white audiences, took the opposite tack. Terrell marched with Howard University’s all-Black Delta Sigma Theta sorority, despite herself being a graduate of Oberlin College.

In the end, parade organizer Mary Ritter Beard convinced Alice Paul and NAWSA leaders that Black women should march where they chose to march. Judging from later accounts of the parade, it may be that at least 50 Black women, and perhaps more, marched along with their rightful delegations.

For more about the issue of race and the suffrage parade, read this interview with J.D. Zahniser, co-author with Amelia R. Fry, of Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

For more information about the suffrage parade and the order in which the delegations marched, you can page through the official program online at the website of the Library of Congress.

¹ "25 Suffragettes Start Hike from New York to Albany to Push 'Cause'," December 12, 1912. Newspaper not known.

² "Suffragist Hike," Newark Evening Star, February 15, 1913, p. 2.

³ "Suffrage Hikers Send Wilson a Flag," New York Times, February 27, 1913, p. 6.