Planning a Protest for Women’s Suffrage in Suffs’ Find a Way
From Suffs the Musical (Broadway 2024; Act 1)
Categories:
Run time: 6:39
Clip Description: The song “Find a Way” from the musical Suffs is set in early 1913 and the women are planning a protest march for the right to vote. This song is based on a real event discussing the planning for the Woman Suffrage Procession, which was held on March 3, 1913 in Washington, D.C. This video is good for highlighting civil liberties (the right to organize a protest), civil rights (the right to vote), and the impact an interest group can have. The right for women to vote in the United States was put into law in 1920 through the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip can be used in discussions revolving around tactics of protest, First Amendment Rights, and the importance of an active citizenry.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip can be useful to teaching Women’s Rights and the importance of the freedoms stated within the first amendment.
Discussion Questions
- The procession was scheduled for the day before a presidential inauguration, in the capital, on the avenue the incoming president’s crowds would fill. That is a strategy: make ignoring you expensive. When does public disruption convert into legislation, and when does it only spend the movement’s credibility and money? Use the 1913 march and one protest you have watched yourself.
- The organizers asked Black suffragists to march in a separate section at the back, to avoid losing white Southern support; Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused and stepped into the Illinois delegation anyway. Make the strongest case for the organizers’ calculation as coalition strategy, and then the strongest case that a movement which buys votes this way has already given up the thing it claims to be asking for.
- The right to assemble protects the march you approve of and the march you do not, on identical terms. Name a movement operating now whose tactics you dislike. Would you give them the permit, the street, and the police protection the 1913 marchers were entitled to and did not receive? If your answer is different for them, state the principled difference, or admit there isn’t one.
Assignment
Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s free digitized newspaper archive, carries papers from the first week of March 1913. Find coverage of the procession in two of them, ideally one Northern and one Southern, or one mainstream paper and one Black-owned paper if your library’s databases reach one. Read what each treats as the story: the demand itself, the spectacle, the disorder in the street, the marchers’ respectability. Write two pages on what that coverage was doing politically, and one paragraph on what a movement can and cannot control about how it gets covered. The hard part is reading past the idiom of 1913 to find the argument underneath it.
For AP Students
AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 3: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights
Topics: 3.10 and 3.11, on social movements and the government’s response to them
Skill: Argumentation
Anchors: Nineteenth Amendment; Letter from a Birmingham Jail
The organizers argue about tactics for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession: what to demand, how visible to be, whom to bring and whom to leave out. Movements are usually taught as outcomes, already won and therefore obviously right. This is the planning meeting, and the disagreement inside it is what students should be looking at.
Discussion questions
- The marchers choose a public spectacle over quieter lobbying. Name one thing a march gets that a lobbying campaign cannot, and one thing it risks.
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail answers the charge that direct action is untimely. Apply that argument to 1913: who was telling the suffragists to wait, and what is the answer to them?
- Under pressure from Southern white participants, organizers tried to place Black suffragists in a separate section at the rear. Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused and marched with the Illinois delegation, and after protests most Black marchers processed with their own state or professional groups. Was the attempt a defensible strategic calculation or a betrayal of the cause? Take a position and defend it.
Short activity
Claim, evidence, reasoning, concession (15 minutes). One paragraph answering whether the 1913 procession advanced women’s suffrage. It needs a defensible claim, one piece of evidence from the clip or from the timeline running to 1920, and one sentence of reasoning tying the evidence to the claim. Then a final sentence conceding the strongest point on the other side. That last sentence is where argument essays are won and lost, and it is the part students skip when they are not required to write it.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.