Washington, D.C. March the 3rd, 1913.

A 26-year-old labor lawyer in a pale blue cape sat astride a white horse named Gray Dawn at the foot of the peace monument on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Her name was Inaz Milholland, and the newspapers called her

the most beautiful suffragist. Behind her stretched a procession of more than 5,000 women,

nine marching bands, 24 floats, and four mounted brigades. They carried one banner that said

everything. We demand an amendment to the Constitution

of the United States in franchising the women of this country. Tomorrow, Woodrow Wilson would be

inaugurated as the 28th president. Today belonged to the women. The whole thing was the work of Alice

Paul, a 28-year-old Quaker from Moors Town, New Jersey,

who weighed about a hundred pounds and had the organizational instincts of a field general.

Paul had spent time in English prisons for the cause of suffrage.

She had been force-fed during hunger strikes.

She had been arrested, jailed, and brutalized, and she came home to

America with a simple conviction. The time for polite petitioning was over. Women had been asking

nicely for 65 years. Paul intended to demand. She arrived in Washington in December of 1912 and

took charge of the Congressional Committee of the

National American Woman Suffrage Association, a body with an annual budget of $10. Within three months,

Paul raised 25,000, recruited thousands of marchers from across the country, secured permits,

hired bands, commissioned elaborate floats, and choreographed

an allegorical pageant on the steps of the Treasury building. She did all of this over the objections

of the D.C. police superintendent, Major Richard Sylvester, who offered her a permit to march

down 16th Street through a residential neighborhood, well away from the crowds.

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