By Jocelyn Maggard | SDUN Reporter

The late summer afternoon sun shone through the trees atop the Kate Session’s statue in Balboa Park where approximately 120 women, and a few men, gathered for the California Centennial Suffrage Parade on August 25.

One hundred years ago, California was the sixth state to grant women the right to vote, and The Women’s Museum of California held their sixth annual suffrage parade in honor of the Centennial.

The date for the parade was chosen to coincide with Women’s Equality Day on August 26, said Ashley Gardner, the museum’s executive director.

The parade’s announcement on the museum’s website reminded participants to grab their signs and hats. Many did dress up. Twenty-five members of the San Diego Costume Guild were at the parade, wearing outfits
like women would have worn in 1911, adding more festivity to the parade.

Evah Allen of the costume guild said this was the first of the museum’s women’s suffrage parade in which they marched.

Around 6 p.m. marchers chanted the words “They thought they were in Heaven, in 1911, when California women finally got the vote,” as they went into Balboa Park via the Cabrillo Bridge, and finished at Spreckels Organ Pavilion where members of the San Diego Women’s Drum Circle kept the beat.

Judy “The Beauty” Forman, civil rights activist, philanthropist, and owner of the award-winning Big Kitchen Café in South Park, was a key personality of the event and composed the chant.

Before the march, elected officials such as California State Senator Christine Kehoe, former Assembly member and congressional candidate Lori Saldana, and Congressman and San Diego mayoral candidate Bob Filner, and Gardner, spoke on the historical and political value of the Centennial celebration, and why women have to continue to stand up for their rights.

Filner, noting his life-long activism in civil rights, quoted Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.”

Kehoe reminded the crowed that women were not given the right to vote, but they won it, and added that the next step is to elect more women into public office.

Other represented groups included Planned Parenthood, YWCA, League of Women Voters, the Older Women’s
League, American Association of University Women, the National Organization for Women, and WSTOPFASD, a group from El Cajon working to prevent Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.

A few men made it to the Aug.25 event; some were dressed in period clothing. Tom Leech, a local San Diego
writer, says he knows many of the women involved in the event, including Gardner, and likes to support the cause and the museum.

For more information about the Women’s Museum of California visit womensmuseumca.org.