Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

women in their eighties and nineties who had been marching for decades. The youngest were tiny girls pushed in perambulators, sticky-cheeked and squalling. In between these two extremes could be found every imaginable stripe of woman from New York City: factory girls, skinny and exhausted; respectable matrons; seamstresses, milliners, laundresses, and clerks. A coalition of Black women had chosen black frocks with yellow sashes and carried yellow-and-black pennants with American flags. A band of women from Chinatown rode in their own automobile decorated with a saffron-yellow dragon, to spare their feet, broken by binding. There were women on horseback, women in academic robes with hoods lined in the satin colors of Vassar and Columbia, women whose seamed faces betrayed a lifetime of hard use. One woman was costumed as Joan of Arc, but much less finely than the Joan of Arc who appeared at an 1880s costume ball.