“Votes for Women!” was a showdown between Alice Paul, 28, versus Woodrow Wilson, 56, which opened with a colorful Washington parade on March 3, 1913, with thousands of women from all over the nation.

Here came the young guard of suffrage, modern and out on the streets for all to witness. Susan B. Anthony was gone, but Paul worked at her desk, summoning a new generation of sisterhood to Washington.

Paul, like the professorial Wilson, had a Ph.D. in political science. She’s still with us, as author of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Senate recently held a hearing on how to advance the amendment to the Constitution.

The incoming president, Wilson was seen as a Progressive when he arrived from Princeton, New Jersey, to be sworn in the next day. But the great hall at Union Station was empty. When Wilson demanded to know where all his supporters were, he heard that everyone was at the Suffrage March spectacle.

Wilson had met his match. Timed to serve notice to Wilson that the suffrage social revolution was a force he’d have to face, Paul’s 1913 blueprint became the model of protest ever after. That was most notable at the peaceful March on Washington in 1963, 50 years later. Aimed at President John F. Kennedy, the gathering at the Lincoln Memorial heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preach his lofty “I Have a Dream” oration.

Paul’s genius was to organize the first time in American history that a mass movement concentrated on only one person: the president. This defiant street theater became the “federal strategy” to expand democracy.

Women were not asking anymore for their rights. They came to claim them, marching and riding on horseback along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The experience was empowering. No longer ladylike, women were creating cohesion like never before. The parade beat conventions in Cleveland.

Seven years of struggle later, women won the right to vote in 1920. Wilson had to surrender after World War I, as women helped the war mobilization at home and went to work overseas as Army nurses near the trenches. Congress passed the 19th Amendment.

But the pressure Paul and her National Woman’s Party put on the president never ceased, with vigils, bonfires and silent protests outside the White House. Public sympathy for the cause began to build. Everyone had a mother, sister or wife in the cause, even in Wilson’s circle.

Paul set up headquarters in Lafayette Square, where it could not escape Wilson’s notice.

For the first time, women risked arrest and abuse in jail. Paul herself was jailed, like her Quaker forebears who defied the king’s authority. William Penn was an ancestor.

Wilson, a Southerner who remembered the Civil War as a boy, was no friend to women or Blacks. He imposed Jim Crow segregation on the federal workforce, a deep wound for generations.

Sadly, the Jim Crow era in the nation’s capital was on ugly display that March day. The police chief ordered Black women to march in the back of the parade. Chicago anti-lynching journalist Ida Wells-Barnett refused to comply, but there it was.

Remarkably, the Suffrage March reveals chilling tropes and rhymes that speak to our present moment: mob violence and police brutality. It also raises the question of leadership.

A white mob showed up to beat marchers with bricks and stones, by the Capitol. Police assigned to protect the women joined in the riot, injuring swaths of nonviolent marchers. One hundred were hospitalized. Finally, the Secretary of State literally called out the cavalry to control the violence.

Finally, the March highlights a truth in human affairs. Social movements need leaders, visions and voices to “keep on keeping on,” such as Alice Paul and later, Dr. King and Gloria Steinem.

Black Lives Matter, Me Too and the 2017 Women’s March made inroads on our dialogue on democracy. Yet names, faces and voices unify any movement.

The life lesson of Paul is clear: confront and challenge power with creative nonviolence. She seized strategy and momentum from the old guard -- who later helped to ratify the 19th amendment, state by state -- and got woman suffrage done.

A century on, the times may yet be ripe to revive the ERA.

Jamie Stiehm may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. Follow her on Twitter @JamieStiehm. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.