“WAGE EARNERS,” dedication ceremonies for the new headquarters of the National Woman’s Party, Washin
“WAGE EARNERS,” dedication ceremonies for the new headquarters of the National Woman’s Party, Washington, D.C., May 21, 1922. Photo c/o @librarycongress.[Note: This post is part of our series on the history and importance of marching on Washington. Please follow @womensmarch.]On May 21, 1922, two years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and just months after the Supreme Court heard—and largely ignored—the final legal challenges to women’s suffrage, the National Woman’s Party opened its new headquarters with a march on Washington in which “every state in the Union was represented as well as 40 foreign countries and 25 professional and occupational groups.” The march drew ten thousand people.The site of the headquarters was “Trumbull’s Row,” three rowhouses with a storied history. In August 1814, during the War of 1812, the British Army burned the U.S. Capitol, forcing Congress to build a temporary home, which it occupied between 1815 and 1819. From 1819 until 1861, the Old Brick Capitol, as it came to be known, served as a private school and a boarding house. With the start of the Civil War, the Union repurchased the building for use as a prison; many of those arrested in connection with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln were held there. In 1867, the building returned to private hands, and it was converted into the rowhouses that ultimately became the National Woman’s Party headquarters. Since 1935, the Supreme Court Building has been located on the land where the Old Brick Capitol used to stand.Belmont, the multi-millionaire who established the National Woman’s Party with Alice Paul, said the purposes of the grand dedication ceremonies were “to acclaim the acceptance into political life of an organized body of women” and “to lay the cornerstone of the first women’s political parliament in the world.” The dedication, she continued, “of these headquarters of the National Woman’s party is not a monument to work already accomplished, but the evidence of a determination to continue the struggle until all forms of the subjection of women are removed.” #HavePrideInHistory #WomensMarch (at Washington, District of Columbia) -- source link
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