On the evening of Thursday, September 16th, 1915, under a “bright-starred, deep-blue California sky,” more than 10,000 visitors to the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) gathered in Golden Gate Park to send three suffragists off on an epic cross-country road trip. The suffrage envoys on center stage that evening were Sara Bard Field, by 1915 already a veteran of several western state suffrage campaigns in California, Oregon, and Nevada, and Maria Kindberg and Ingeborg Kindstedt, two Swedish-American suffragists from Rhode Island who owned the brand-new Overland car and knew how to both drive and maintain an automobile. Another prominent national suffrage organizer, Mabel Vernon, traveled by train ahead of the car and connected with local suffrage chapters to set up events, parades, and meetings with mayors and other dignitaries in every major city the envoys visited and, most importantly, to make sure their activities received extensive press coverage. Between September and December 1915 they drove through 21 states from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. with the end goal of hand-delivering to President Woodrow Wilson a petition of signatures gathered in support of a simple message: We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, enfranchising women.
At the celebratory send-off at the fair’s Court of Abundance, a procession of young women dressed in the traditional costumes of Norway, Finland, and other nations where women already exercised the right to vote, spotlighted how the United States lagged behind in the international progress of suffrage. By 1915, women had full voting rights in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Australia, and New Zealand, and American women could vote in eleven states, all in the West: Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Utah and Idaho (both in 1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona, Oregon, and Kansas (all in 1912), and Montana and Nevada (both in 1914). But the denial of voting rights to any U.S. citizens was an embarrassment to a democratic nation trying to display its strength and innovation on the world stage, both at the fair and soon to be abroad in world war. Stretched across the Congressional Union booth at the Expo, a banner reminded visitors: “The world has progressed in most ways, but not yet in its recognition of women.”
The three women, empowered by their powerful purpose, then drove away from the Expo, a choir singing and the crowd waving goodbye:
Orange lanterns swayed in the breeze; purple, white and gold draperies fluttered, the blare of the band burst forth, and the great surging crowd followed to the gates...Cheers burst forth as the gates opened and the big car swung through, ending the most dramatic and significant suffrage convention that has probably ever been held in the history of the world.