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I love fiction. Historical fiction is one of my favorites and I suspect that a lot of people get their history facts from these books. The good thing is that most historical fiction authors are pretty good about sticking with the facts although they make up dialogue and personalities, hence the fiction. But if you know something about the subject, it\u2019s hard to know what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Chiaverini has the reputation of being someone who sticks with the facts but makes the characters come alive for us. Her book, The Women\u2019s March\u2013<\/em> A Novel of the 1913 Women\u2019s Suffrage Procession<\/em> is about the Suffrage march in 1913, which upstaged President-elect Wilson\u2019s inaugural and made it clear that the suffrage issue could not be ignored. In reading it, I found myself wondering what was fact and what was fiction, and what her sources were. She did not footnote her sources, which would not be typical in a work of fiction, but a note on sources would have been helpful.<\/p>\n Chiaverini did reveal one plot invention that allowed her to tie together her three heroines\u2014Alice Paul founder of the Congressional Union and mastermind of the March; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the anti-lynching journalist, civil rights worker, and black suffragist from Illinois; and Maud Malone, a disruptive figure from NY who persisted in asking politicians of all stripes what their position was on woman suffrage. In the book, Maud is one of the hikers with General Rosalie Jones. The author acknowledges in the book\u2019s afterword that Maud Malone \u201cprobably wasn\u2019t\u201d on the Pilgrim\u2019s Hike from NY to DC in the cold month of February 1913.<\/p>\n Our heroine, Elisabeth Freeman, was<\/em> on that hike, every muddy inch of it, and like Maud Malone she was an outspoken speaker willing to shake up the usual social order to speak out for suffrage and other causes. This blog has been mining her giant scrapbook of newspaper clippings and memorabilia; the Pilgrim Hike and Women\u2019s March were the most detailed of any of her activities. (As an aside, Maud Malone does show up in the clippings in Upton Sinclair\u2019s protest of Rockefeller\u2019s massacre of striking miners.) In looking through the many pages of clippings about the hike I found a few interesting references to the questions raised in the book.<\/p>\n The infighting between \u201cGeneral\u201d Rosalie Jones and the mainstream suffs is fascinating and was real enough, but I would love to know more background. The center of the controversy was a letter from Dr. Anna Howard Shaw President of NAWSA. Rosalie had requested that she write a letter to President-elect Wilson, which they would deliver. The closer they got to Washington politics, the less the optics of that seemed like a good idea. So NAWSA HQ instructed Rosalie to hand the letter over to Alice Paul, head of the Congressional Committee for delivery, sparking a fight in the newspapers. In the end, no meeting with the President happened, although the largest demonstration surely had more of an impression on him than the rather timid letter would have.<\/p>\n Gen. Jones, for her part, stated that the letter was the reason for their hike (which it wasn\u2019t) and that national was just \u201cjealous\u201d of the publicity she was getting (which was<\/em> the point\u2013the phenomenal coverage). Genevieve Champ Clark, daughter of the Speaker of the House, wrote her version of events and said, \u201cBefore I came upon those heroic women\u2026I had regarded the hike as sort of a lark.\u201d<\/p>\n Chiaverini seems to imply that national and Paul thought the Hike was ill-advised and perhaps a \u201cdistraction\u201d created by rogue players. Paul was right that \u201cmessage control\u201d was vital. I can\u2019t imagine a national event of this magnitude today being upstaged by a handful of unaffiliated partisans. If you\u2019re going to stage a giant protest you want a united front. But the hike provided front page suffrage copy for the better part of a month in the dailies. And as Col. Ida B. Craft always pointed out, the person to person contact won many converts to the cause.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a bitter little band of brave women, who walked with heads erect from Fifteenth and H Streets NE to the Capitol and then through Pennsylvania Avenue,\u201d wrote one paper. The hikers, however, were enjoying the large crowds cheering them on when, at 12th<\/sup> St., two women, \u201cattired as heralds in white, dashed up on snow white steeds. They said nothing to the \u2018General\u2019 \u2026 but immediately took the head of the line.\u201d Alice Paul showed up and mollified the hikers with a warm welcome. Still, some of the hikers skipped the luncheon honoring them. (\u201cHikers are Vexed at Suffragettes\u201d Feb 28, 1913; also \u201cPublic Greeting is Balm to \u2018Hikers\u2019 on Entry to Capital\u201d both unidentified newspapers) The picture here shows the police escort and the two heralds and Elisabeth\u2019s little wagon surrounded by a sea of people.<\/p>\n A nice touch from The Woman\u2019s March is the loyalty of the press corps embedded with the hikers. There were 16 \u201cwar correspondents\u201d covering the hike at one time or another and they were unusually loyal and protective of the hikers, so the idea that Rosalie could have insisted that they march with the hikers is plausible, but that they fended off violent crowds is open to question in my mind. And would have these embedded journalists have joined the March? Again, I\u2019d love to see documentation of that, even as I admire the flourish.<\/p>\n (One clipping suggests that the journalists were \u201cadvisors\u201d to Jones, and clearly wished her to start another organization but Jones repeatedly said, \u201cI\u2019m a soldier and will follow orders\u201d although that didn\u2019t stop her from being publicly grumpy about it.)<\/p>\n Troublesome part of suffrage history<\/strong><\/p>\n The most compelling character in The Woman\u2019s March is Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the black woman who challenged the white suffragists to allow Negro Women\u2019s Suffrage clubs to march. In the book, \u201cnational\u201d is trying to appease the Southern chapters who threatened to pull their support if blacks were allowed to march, so they waffled about black participation. Alice Paul was a Quaker so it is quite likely that at first she welcomed Negro participation before national politics came into play. This is one area where some real documentation would illuminate this troublesome part of suffrage history.<\/p>\n As for General Jones, we have a less than stellar response on the issue. At the end of an article about how Baltimore suffs were not willing to hike with the Pilgrims, there is a short item \u201cNegro Women May Join\u201d which I quote in its entirety, to show the racism of the news writing at the time as well as her response:<\/p>\n\n
Elisabeth Freeman, was<\/em> on that hike, every muddy inch of it<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Much was made of the rough handling of the marchers by unruly crowds that the police were incapable of, or unwilling, to restrain. Students from an Agricultural College in Maryland did jeer them on their hike, but in the book, these bullies showed up at the March to continue their harassment of the hikers. I wonder if this part was true. The crowds \u2018welcoming\u2019 the hikers into DC were huge; one estimate put the crowd along the route into DC as 100,000 and near Suffrage HQ they put it at 25,000 in one block, making it difficult to pass through. Pictures of the entry show the massive crowds and you can only imagine some jostling or worse. And I\u2019m sure some rowdies took advantage of the situation to rough up some uppity women. But those same rowdies from the Agricultural College? I doubt it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/elisabethfreeman.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/ef-entry-to-dc-white-horse-300x185.jpeg\"\/)
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A big scene in the book is the welcoming, or lack of it, by the Congressional Committee. They didn\u2019t hook up as expected but Chiaverini puts it on the hikers who changed the route without telling anyone to maximize their exposure to crowds. In the clippings I have, the two envoys astride white stallions, got lost and belatedly found the hikers. One account put it, \u201cthe local committee, lost either purposely or by accident, was late in greeting the pilgrims.\u201d Stung by the fight over the letter, this added to the hurt feelings.<\/p>\n