Brass Belles: The Missouri Ladies Marching Band

Brass Belles: The Ladies Missouri Marching Band (1913)

As we celebrate—or I hope we celebrate, or at least remember—the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing the right of women to vote, I am remembering the role that music, as well as words, played in this extraordinary triumph.

It took 42 years for the suffrage bill Susan B. Anthony introduced to Congress in 1878 for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution to be passed by all the states and the Federal Government. By 1920, its author, Anthony, was dead.

All along the way, women from all parts of the country had marched for passage—as well as singing and writing music. England had insured votes for women in 1918; Dame Ethel Smyth had composed “The March of the Women.”

Here in the U.S., one of the most inspiring movements was Alma Nash’s “Brass Belles: The Ladies Missouri Marching Band” (1913). At President Woodrow Wilson’s Inauguration in Washington D.C., March 3, 1913, the band was at first positioned far back in the big suffragist parade, but when men blocked the way, the Band moved to the front and led the rest of the march, unopposed, as it passed the White House.

The Suffrage Song Book, lyrics composed in 1909 by Henry W. Roby and set to familiar popular songs, featured “Dare You Do It?” to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

One verse went

“Ye men who wrong your mothers,
And your wives and sisters, too,
How dare you rob companions
Who are always brave and true?
How dare you make them servants
Who are all the world to you
As they go marching on?”

Music was always a part of the movement, encouraging and accompanying. The Mother of Us All, an opera by the well-known American composer Virgil Thomson had lyrics written by the iconic American writer Gertrude Stein. How rare to find writers and composers from the international world to write in support of women—although Stein in her convoluted way always sustained the voices of women as in her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

And there was Mrs. Moyer-Wing who rode her mare, La Bella, through the backcountry in the Ozarks in 1916, photographing and speaking on behalf of suffrage. She said, “The job of housewife is a great job but it ain’t any more possible for all women to want to do it than anything else in the world.” She saw the link between women’s struggle for education twenty years earlier to the familiar fear that education would “everlastingly spoil women for motherhood… The same sort of foolish things were said when women asked to own their own property,” including their wages. She added, “I reckon they said the same thing when women got up the courage to ask for souls.”

Always, the same struggle.

In Women Suffrage Susan B. Anthony Gertrude Stein