[WOMEN'S HISTORY & LITERATURE] [SUFFRAGE]

Six Original Postcard Views of the Washington, D.C. Suffragette's Parade, March 3rd, 1913

Baltimore: I. & M. Ottenheimer, 1913. First Edition. Six black-and-white photographic views (collotypes) on card stock, 3-1/2" x 5-1/8" or the reverse. Views captioned in image; versos printed for mailing, with publisher's imprint at left margin. Original printed publisher's envelope included, 3-5/8" x 6" with gummed flap, printed in black on pink stock. Minor soil to card versos; one image faintly discolored at upper corner; complete and generally Very Good to Near Fine.

A rare artifact of a defining event in the history of the struggle for American women's rights. The 1913 Suffragettte's Parade (or Procession, as it was formally named), organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association co-chairs Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, took place the day before Woodrow Wilson's inaugural parade, very intentionally following the same planned route. The event was militant from the start, and provoked a similarly militant backlash, with male counter-protesters jeering, spitting, and even attacking the women marchers from the sidelines. Police reputedly refused to intervene on the marchers' behalf, and National Guard troops were eventually needed to quell the violence and allow the procession to reach its end. The event spurred a great deal of news coverage (in some newspapers even supplanting Wilson's inaugural parade the following day) and led to a Congressional investigation – all of which proved ultimately to be an enormous boon to the Suffrage movement, gaining the marchers a great deal of public sympathy and energizing those already committed to the cause.

An extremely scarce set of views, issued by a small, regional post-card publisher and likely never marketed outside of the Baltimore - Washington D.C. region. The Ottenheimer Brothers, originally known as booksellers and stationers, opened their first establishment in Baltimore in the early 1890s; by the early 1900's, at the beginning of the American "postcard craze," they appear to have added wholesale postcard publishing to their repertoire – though it remained a sideline. The company teamed with printers and photographers to capture local events, with most of their print runs apparently in the low thousands - truly minuscule by postcard standards (an excellent article on this small Baltimore firm, by historian George Miller, is available on-line at postcardhistory.dot.net). We note only three institutional holdings for individual cards from the series. We have traced one other complete set in commerce (Hake's Auctions, 2021) apparently lacking the envelope.

Price: $1,500.00

Go Back