The Value of the Ballot

White feminists were not done reenvisioning society. Six months after Alice Paul waved a triumphal American flag from the National Woman’s Party balcony, the organization held an open meeting to celebrate the winning of the vote and decide what it should do next. They organized a conference, an unveiling of a memorial to “suffrage pioneers,” and a procession and pageant featuring 250 women on February 15, 1921. The ceremony embodied the potential and the limitations of that moment. The procession indicated a capacious vision of a broad women’s movement that included women of multiple races, religions, and classes. Leaders of the National Woman’s Party, however, continued to see the suffrage struggle as fundamentally a movement of white women. In memorializing the history of the suffrage struggle, they literally carved that version in stone.