chapéus

Would this be the notification committee we've seen in other pics?

They certainly look happy. Was this in 1912? With the GOP in disarray that year, I'd guess they smell blood in the water, after 44 of the last 52 years having a Republican President.

Many of them seem to have the same hat. Are those Panama hats? I wonder if this meeting had something to do with the Panama canal.

They look like "boater" hats, popularly worn in the summers of that era: www.gentlemansemporium.com/store/hats.php?from=leftnav Top hats were out, and fedora's would not come in for another 15 years or so. The Panama Canal had already been built and fully operational this point, during the Roosevelt administration.

I'm surprised that they're sitting on the grass-- you'd never see that kind of thing these days.

Becker was the first American police officer to receive the death penalty for murder. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Becker

I wonder if these could have been the "oregon girls" mentioned in second article from NYT (June 13, 1912) in query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B02E7DE113AE633A... Nine girls from Oregon were trying to see the sights of New York in two days before going on to Washington, DC, where a visit to the president was planned. They were daughters of well-to-do farmers from different regions of the state on a chaperoned trip. A similar trip was made the next year too. See query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A02E5DF153FE633A... from June 18, 1913. The participants for this trip were teachers.

I made a purse from this image:

Oh, shoot, I just re-read swanq's comments--the photo is from 1912! But I can fix the purse, no problem.... ;)

This image has been used in the indicommons.org post: Suffragette Purses

On another purse: