Can women’s political activism spur women’s political participation? Women’s under-representation in politics creates a prior that politics is not for them, reducing their interest in politics. Previous research identified that women politicians facilitated other women’s political participation and mobilisation. Through the study of the British suffragists, we argue that women activists paved the way for other women’s political participation at a time when women were virtually absent from formal politics. Constructing a novel micro-level dataset of geocoded women’s registration, we employ a differences-in-differences that compares parishes based on proximity to the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Pilgrimage across England. We show that ‘exposure’ to the suffragists marching for parliamentary suffrage increased propertied women’s registration in local elections. Analysing contemporary news articles, we document the pathways through which marching suffragists incited other women’s political interests and electoral participation. These findings affect the quality of women’s substantive representation after suffrage.