Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

People

Location

50 Town Square, Lima, OH 45801, USA

Lat/Long

40.740204, -84.104506

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

As president of the Allen County Political Equality Club, suffragist Bessie Crayton helped to organize a parade of suffrage supporters that marched through Lima, Ohio on October 20, 1914.

In the days leading up to the parade, Crayton stated the intent of the suffrage marchers in the October 15, 1914 edition of the Lima Daily News:

We are not marching for effect but it is to be a band of serious, earnest women, striving to show the injustice of the present voting system of the state.

According to the October 21, 1914 edition of the Lima Daily News, 1,500 suffrage marchers, including women, men, and children from all over northwestern Ohio, took part in the Lima parade, while thousands more turned out to watch the procession from the sidewalks. It was reported that many in attendance, both marchers and spectators, wore the yellow rose in symbolic support of women’s suffrage.

The Lima Daily News noted that the parade was headed by the Lima City Band, followed by a car that carried suffrage leaders Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriet Taylor Upton, decorated in yellow roses and driven by local suffragist Mildred Rudy. Mounted horsewomen marshals were used to keep the procession in line. The parade included delegations from various women’s clubs, teachers, college women, church women, homemakers, and representatives from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The Lima Daily News also reported that African American church members, both women and men, participated in the suffrage march. A group of school girls in white carried banners that read “Future Voters.”

The parade started at Memorial Hall on West Elm Street, made its way through the city, and ended back at Memorial Hall where a mass meeting was held at which Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriet Taylor Upton spoke in support of women’s right to vote.

Women finally achieved the right to vote with the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”