No, early suffragettes didn’t eat pizza in bathing suits to annoy men

Womenfolk can be so darn irksome, harping about voting rights and whining about equal pay and slamming some ‘za to provoke the guys. Or so claims a recent Facebook post featuring a black-and-white photo of women eating.

"In 1921," reads the June 6 post, "early suffragettes often donned a bathing suit and ate pizza in large groups to annoy men…it was a custom at the time."

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) That’s because the photo is from 1921, but it shows a pie eating contest in Washington D.C., not a savory act of protest.

You can find the photo on the Library of Congress website under the title, "pie eating contest, Bathing Beach, [7/21/31]." The photo was created on July 31, 1921, and was provided by the National Photo Company Collection, which "documents virtually all aspects of Washington, D.C., life," according to the Library of Congress.

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A clearer version of the photo appears on Shorpy, a "historic American photo archive" website that sells prints. That site also states that the photo was taken on July 31 that year during a pie eating contest at Tidal Basin Bathing Beach.

We couldn’t find any credible reports of suffragettes eating pizza to annoy men — though the claim has appeared on Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest, among other websites — and definitely not in 1921. By then, women had secured voting rights. The 19th Amendment, which guaranteed all American women could cast a ballot, was ratified in 1920.

We rate this Facebook post as False.