After the visits of the English women, American suffragists everywhere began to view their cause in the light of a political movement.

They began to adopt political methods.

Instead of private meetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of the already convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street corners and to talk suffrage to the man in the street.
The first suffrage demonstration was held in New York in February, 1908.
The members of a small but enthusiastic Equal Suffrage Club announced their intention of having a parade.

Most of the women being wage earners they planned to have their parade on a Sunday.

When they applied at Police Headquarters for the necessary permit they found to their disgust that Sunday parades were forbidden by law.
"Not unless you are a funeral procession," said the stern captain of the police.
The woman replied that they were anything but a funeral procession, and threatened darkly to hold their parade in spite of police regulations.
They got plenty of newspaper publicity in the succeeding days, and on the following Sunday a huge crowd of men, a sprinkling of women, a generous number of plain clothes men, and New York's famous "camera squad" assembled in Union Square, where all incendiary things happen.
The dauntless seven who made up the suffrage club were there, and at the psychological moment one of the women ran up the steps of a park pavilion and spoke in a ringing voice, yet so quietly that the police made no move to stop her.
"Friends," she said, "we are not allowed to have our parade, so we are going to hold a meeting of protest at No.