The Library of Congress | American Memory
Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party
TACTICS AND TECHNIQUES OF THE NATIONAL WOMAN’S
PARTY SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGN
Introduction
Founded in 1913 as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), the National
Woman’s Party (NWP) was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women’s suffrage
campaign. The party successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress,
and state legislators to support passage of a 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (known
popularly as the “Anthony” amendment) guaranteeing women nationwide the right to vote. The
NWP also established a legacy defending the exercise of free speech, free assembly, and the
right to dissent–especially during wartime. (See
Historical Overview)
The NWP had only 50,000 members compared to the 2 million members claimed by its
parent organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
Nonetheless, the NWP effectively commanded the attention of politicians and the public through
its aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, creative publicity stunts, repeated acts of nonviolent
confrontation, and examples of civil disobedience. The NWP forced the more moderate NAWSA
toward greater activity. These two groups, as well as other suffrage organizations, rightly
claimed victory on August 26, 1920, when the 19th Amendment was signed into law.
The tactics used by the NWP to accomplish its goals were versatile and creative. Its
leaders drew inspiration from a variety of sources–including the British suffrage campaign,
American labor activism, and the temperance, antislavery, and early women’s rights campaigns
in the United States. Traditional lobbying and petitioning were a mainstay of party members.
From the beginning, however, conventional politicking was supplemented by other more public
actions–including parades, pageants, street speaking, demonstrations, and mass meetings.
In its western campaigns of 1914 and 1916, the CU sent out contingents of organizers and
speakers to states where women already were enfranchised. They targeted candidates for
congressional office and urged voters to use the ballot to express their dissatisfaction with the
lack of action on behalf of a federal suffrage amendment. Transcontinental auto trips, speaking
tours, motorcade parades, banners, billboards, and other methods helped spread the word and
educate the public about suffragists and suffrage issues.
Four years into their campaign and shortly before the United States entered World War I,
NWP strategists realized that they needed to escalate their pressure and adopt more aggressive
tactics. Most important among these was picketing at the White House–a concerted action that
lasted for many months and led to the arrest and imprisonment of many NWP activists.
The willingness of NWP pickets to be arrested, their campaign for recognition as political
prisoners rather than as criminals, and their acts of civil disobedience in jail–including hunger
strikes and the retaliatory force-feedings by authorities–shocked the nation and brought attention
and support to their cause. Through constant agitation, the NWP effectively compelled President
Wilson to support a federal woman suffrage amendment. Similar pressure on national and state
legislators led to congressional approval of the 19
th
Amendment in June 1919 and ratification 14
months later by three-fourths of the states.
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Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party
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Lobbying and Petitioning
From its outset in 1912, the purpose of the Congressional
Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA), spearheaded by
Lucy Burns and Alice
Paul, was to exert pressure upon Congress to pass an amendment
to the U.S. Constitution giving the right to vote to women across
the nation. Lobbying for a federal amendment remained integral
to the committee’s successor organizations, the Congressional
Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) and the National Woman’s
Party (NWP).
Women’s use of lobbying as a democratic technique for
social change was not new. The practice of exerting pressure upon officeholders to change
existing discriminatory laws limiting women’s opportunities or curtailing their rights as political
beings or as private citizens was a well-established tradition in the women’s rights movement.
At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, reformers framed resolutions which they brought to the
attention of legislatures and courts and used to educate the general public.
Deputation to the House Rules
Committee. Buck. July 1914.
About this image
Petitioning–the gathering of signatures in support of
resolutions and the formal presentation of these documents to
political representatives–in order to demonstrate graphically the
“will of the people” also was a time-honored political tradition.
The CU presented petitions to members of Congress, and
occasionally organized large delegations to gather on the steps of
the U.S. Capitol, with members from various states set to visit
their respective representatives.
The CU legislative committee compiled a congressional
card index with information about every member of the House
and Senate. These files contained
background about the
individual’s public career, their values, favorite projects, prior
votes, and the issues of greatest concern to their constituents. CU
organizers consulted these files to prepare its lobbyists for
meetings with members of Congress, so as to best address
suffrage from a perspective that would be most meaningful and
persuasive to the lawmaker.
Suffrage petition for all NWP sections
carried to the U.S. Senate by Annie Fraher,
Bertha Moller, Bertha Arnold, and Anita
Pollitzer, campaign of 1918. Harris &
Ewing.
About this image
While NWP legislative committee officers testified at
congressional hearings, petitioned Congress, and monitored and
helped to shape legislative action, the leaders of the CU, and later the NWP, focused much of
their lobbying efforts on President Woodrow Wilson. The Democratic president was initially
receptive to a series of CU delegations, each representing different groups of women–working
women, professional women, women from various states or occupations, social workers,
reformers, and others. Nonetheless, he remained largely unmoved by their appeals. Wilson
claimed that he could not go against the will of his party. He persisted in taking a states’ rights
stance–reiterating his position that women’s voting rights were best determined locally.
U.S. Senate petitioner motorcade,
Hyattsville, Maryland. W. R. Ross. July
31, 1913.
About this image
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Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party
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In early 1917, Wilson rebuffed a delegation of more than 300 suffrage supporters who
presented him with resolutions drafted at the memorial for
Inez Milholland Boissevain. The
NWP thereafter significantly shifted its strategy toward overt forms of public protest and civil
disobedience. (See Picketing and Demonstrations and Arrests and Imprisonment) While the more
formal political work of the NWP legislative committee continued, the NWP picketing
campaign–its banners fully visible to the president as he came in and out of the White House
gates–became its own form of lobbying. Picketing the White House also sought to influence
international opinion by pointing out the irony of advocating democracy abroad while limiting
the exercise of political rights at home.
As the ratification campaign of 1919-20 commenced, NWP lobbying necessarily shifted
to the state level. NWP officers and organizers fanned out to influence ratification at special
sessions of state legislatures and to persuade state party leaders to back the amendment. In states
where the votes were very close, lobbying by NWP representatives was crucial in convincing the
conflicted or undecided to support the amendment.
After the 19
th
Amendment officially became part of the
U.S. Constitution in August 1920, the NWP continued to use
lobbying and petitioning techniques to work for their new
campaign–the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Beginning in
the 1920s, and continuing until 1972, the organization worked to
introduce the amendment to various sessions of Congress and
urged state governments to support equal rights legislation. NWP
activists also supported the campaigns of women running for
office and drafted pieces of legislation guaranteeing or protecting
women’s rights. They lobbied on behalf of the ERA as delegates
at both Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Lobbying for the Equal Rights
Amendment, U.S. Capitol. Edmonston.
ca. 1923.
About this image
The ERA was finally approved in 1972 by both houses of Congress after decades of
NWP lobbying. Over the next decade, NWP members shepherded the measure through
ratification at the state level, falling short of ratification by only three states in 1982. Following
the failure of the ERA campaign, the NWP regrouped and reassessed its goals. The party ceased
its political lobbying function officially in 1999, when it became a nonprofit educational
organization.
Parades
As soon as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were appointed to
the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s
Congressional Committee, they began planning a large and
elaborate suffrage parade for Washington, D.C., on the eve of
President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. (See
Historical
Overview) This celebrated event was the first national suffrage
parade in the United States, but it was inspired by earlier and
larger suffrage processions.
Inez Milholland Boissevain preparing to
lead the March 3, 1913, suffrage parade in
Washington, D.C. Harris & Ewing.
About this image
The first American suffrage parades took place in 1908. In
February of that year, a small band of 23 women, affiliated with a
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new militant organization calling itself the American Suffragettes, marched up Broadway in
New York City to a meeting hall on East 23
rd
Street. A few months later, 300 suffragists in
Oakland, California, marched into a state political convention holding banners and streamers
demanding the right to vote. That same month, 100 women in Boone, Iowa, paraded through the
streets with suffrage banners welcoming national leader Anna Howard Shaw to their state
suffrage convention.
The first sizable suffrage parade, however, took place in
New York City on May 21, 1910. More than 400 women
marched and many more rode in automobiles. This parade, as
well as the increasingly larger ones in May 1911 (an estimated
3,000 marchers), May 1912 (10,000), and November 1912
(20,000), were organized principally by Harriot Stanton Blatch,
who like Paul and Burns, participated in the British suffrage
campaign.
The earliest American suffrage parades were influenced
both by British suffrage processions as well as a long tradition of
parades in the United States. The American tradition included
patriotic marches commemorating July 4, temperance
demonstrations, religious processions, May Day parades
organized by socialists and labor groups, and marches and street demonstrations by striking
workers, such as those organized by female factory workers in
Lynn, Massachusetts, in the 1860s, and by New York City
shirtwaist workers in 1909-10.
Crowd converging on marchers and
blocking parade route during March 3,
1913, inaugural suffrage procession,
Washington, D.C. Leet Brothers.
About this image
Although many women moved freely in the public
sphere–including those who worked outside the home in paid and
volunteer positions–the prevailing notion among middle-class
circles in the early 1900s was that only women of supposedly
poor character (for example, prostitutes) walked the streets.
Suffragists, conscious of the boundaries that they were crossing,
steeped their parades in pomp and pageantry, developing highly
organized and theatrical processions. Their intent was to dazzle
and impress onlookers, attract recruits, grab the attention of
legislators who found it easy to ignore suffrage petitions, and
dispel unfavorable perceptions of suffragists as pathetic spinsters or aggressive shrews who
neglected their families and browbeat their husbands.
Members of the Congressional Union for
Woman Suffrage pasting advertisements
announcing the May 9, 1914, procession
to the U.S. Capitol to present resolutions
to Congress. May 1914.
About this image
Marchers were instructed by parade organizers to walk with dignity and convey a serious,
respectable demeanor compatible with that of a responsible voter. Watching women of all classes
parading down public thoroughfares demanding voting rights was disturbing to many men and
even some women, including initially, moderate suffragists. Carrie Chapman Catt, for example,
declined to participate in a 1909 parade saying: “We do not have to win sympathy by parading
ourselves like the street cleaning department.” The controversy within the suffrage ranks over the
propriety of parades reflected why such events were newsworthy–they challenged existing
conventions of how women should behave in public.
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In organizing their March 3, 1913, parade, Paul and
Burns borrowed elements from many of the earlier parades. To
reinforce the notion of a universal demand for suffrage, women
marched in well-identified groups by state or occupation
(including teachers, lawyers, actresses, nurses, librarians, and
factory workers). This structured procession reflected, in part, the
decentralized aspect of the suffrage movement and the role of the
national organizations in bringing together the state chapters and
branches. College students and mothers–some marching with
children and infants–had their own sections, as did men’s
suffrage leagues.
Women and young girls on “Votes for
Women” float, winner of first prize in
Vineland, New Jersey, suffrage parade.
ca.1914.
About this image
Bands and opulent floats provided visual relief from the steady stream of marchers. Some
participants wore special color-coordinated outfits; others wore
white dresses (in the temperance tradition) adorned with colorful
sashes–gold for NAWSA and later, purple, white, and gold for
the militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Hats,
dresses, pins, buttons, and sashes were made or purchased from
local department stores that stocked suffrage supplies.
Carefully designed and sewn or embroidered banners
were used as rhetorical devices to convey political messages.
Banners commemorated famous women who inspired the
suffragists, identified the diverse groups who had come together
to support the cause, and were critical in conveying who these women were and why they were
marching. They also helped transform the traditionally masculine streetscape into a forum for
women’s viewpoints.
College section of the March 3, 1913,
suffrage parade in Washington, D.C.
About this image
Pageants
A critical component of the first national suffrage parade on
March 3, 1913, in Washington, D.C., was the elaborate tableau, “The
Allegory,” produced by pageant designer
Hazel MacKaye. Through sheer
persistence and moxie,
Alice Paul secured permission from government
officials to use the grand steps of the Treasury Building during working
hours to mount a feminist pageant. The performance included 100
classically costumed women and children representing ideals such as
Freedom, Justice, Peace, Charity, Liberty, and Hope as well as
outstanding female historical figures including Sappho, Joan of Arc, and
Elizabeth of England. More than 20,000 people reportedly watched the
pageant, including a reporter from the New York Times who gushed that
it was “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in
this country.”
“Liberty and her Attendants”–
Florence F. Noyes in “The
Allegory” tableau.
Washington, D.C. L & M
Ottenheimer. March 3, 1913.
About this image
Like parades, suffrage pageants and tableaus had deep historical
roots, which the suffragists tapped when looking for ways to attract
publicity and new members. Some suffragists were drawn to the idea of
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linking artistic inclinations with political activism. Others preferred performing on a stage or
assisting behind-the-scenes rather than marching in a parade.
MacKaye, the best known of all pageant directors,
created four pageants for the Congressional Union for Woman
Suffrage (CU) and National Woman’s Party (NWP) between
1913 and 1923. She claimed that nothing surpassed pageants “for
the purpose of propaganda,” believing that these events could
convert followers, raise money, and elevate morale among
suffrage workers. By making women, both mythical and real, the
central figures in these plays, MacKaye and other pageant
organizers empowered both the participants and the women who
watched these tableaus.
The year after directing “The Allegory,” MacKaye created
“The American Woman: Six Periods of American Life,” a multi-
part tableau sponsored by a New York men’s suffrage league and
staged at a regimental armory in New York. The CU promoted
this feminist pageant and hired MacKaye to produce a third
pageant, titled “Susan B. Anthony,” for its December 1915
convention in Washington. MacKaye spent months researching
Anthony’s life and pouring over copies of the History of Woman
Suffrage. The result was so impressive that it reportedly inspired
CU members to carry on Anthony’s militant tradition of suffrage
activism.
Agnes Lester, Marjorie Follette, Emily
Knight, Elizabeth Van Sickle, and Carol
Lester as warriors in the “Dance Drama
Depicting the Progress of Woman,”
Seneca Falls, New York. Underwood &
Underwood. July 20, 1923.
About this image
Pageants outlived parades as a publicity tool and were
brought forward into the NWP’s equal rights campaign.
MacKaye’s final two pageants for the NWP were held
respectively in July and September 1923 in Seneca Falls, New
York, and in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Both pageants
celebrated the 75
th
anniversary of the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848
and sought to attract new members to the party as it prepared to have the equal rights amendment
introduced in Congress. The Colorado pageant was spectacularly mounted at the Garden of the
Gods rock formation. It created a visual backdrop that competed with the
1840s costumes and
rivaled the staging of the first national pageant on the Treasury Building steps.
Eleanor Van Buskirk (left) and ritualists
from the "Forward into Light" pageant at
the NWP’s “Women for Congress”
conference. August 1924.
About this image
Picketing and Demonstrations
In December 1916, after nearly four years of lobbying, petitioning, parading, and
engaging in one clever publicity stunt after another (See
Historical Overview), Alice Paul and
several key members of the Congressional Union’s executive committee felt that their tactics
were growing stale and ineffective. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of suffrage pioneer
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, told the committee: “We can’t organize bigger and more influential
deputations. We can’t organize bigger processions. We can’t, women, do anything more in that
line. We have got to take a new departure.”
The NWP had already withstood mob violence while demonstrating with anti-Wilson
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banners outside a Chicago auditorium during the October 1916 presidential campaign. Blatch
believed that the time had come for suffragists to escalate the pressure on President Woodrow
Wilson, whom she supposedly told: “I have worked all my life
for suffrage, and I am determined that I will never again stand in
the street corners of a great city appealing to every Tom, Dick,
and Harry for the right of self-government.” What Blatch had in
mind was picketing, a tactic used effectively in New York by her
former organization, the Women’s Political Union, and with
which she–and Paul–were familiar from their experiences with
British suffragists.
No one, however, had apparently ever thought or dared to
picket the White House and convincing the other committee
members to picket the White House was not easy. This situation
changed, however, when Wilson summarily dismissed a
deputation of suffragists who tried to present him with a series of
suffrage resolutions passed during
Inez Milholland Boissevain’s memorial service. The next day,
on January 10, 1917, a dozen determined women left the Congressional Union (CU)
headquarters at Cameron House and marched to the White House. They carried tricolor purple,
white, and gold flags as well as two banners. One read, “Mr President, What Will You Do For
Woman Suffrage?” The other banner featured words taken from Milholland’s last speech. It
asked, “How Long Must Woman Wait For Liberty?”
N
WP members picket outside the
International Amphitheater in Chicago,
where Woodrow Wilson delivers a
speech. October 20, 1916.
About this image
Every day for the next few months, regardless of the
weather, a group of women marched from CU headquarters to
the White House to take up their stations as “silent sentinels.”
NWP organizers carefully planned every detail. Banners were
made and volunteers were recruited and scheduled for shifts of
several hours. Nearly 2,000 suffragists traveled from 30 states to
take turns on the picket line. Special days were set aside for
women representing specific states, schools, organizations, and
occupations. When the United States entered World War I in
April 1917, however, some women resigned from the NWP
because they viewed picketing as unpatriotic as well as
unwomanly. These departures, however, were offset by new
recruits–including many socialists, labor organizers, and average
working women–who were attracted to the militancy, justice, and
free speech aspects of the campaign.
Wage-earning women march to the White
House gates to picket on their day off,
Sunday. February 18, 1917.
About this image
Some suffragists found picketing an exhilarating and bonding experience, even more so
after the first arrests on June 20, 1917, further raised the spirit of determination and moral
purpose. Other suffragists, however, described how the “sockets of their arms ache[d] from the
strain.”
Doris Stevens wrote of the tedium, “anything but standing at the President’s gate would
be more diverting,” and explained that she and others spent their time thinking “when will that
woman come to relieve me.”
1
At times, the pickets had more to worry about than achy arms and
boredom. Mob violence grew after the United States entered World War I, with two especially
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noteworthy attacks on the suffragists in the summer of 1917. These attacks followed the initial
unfurling of banners comparing the president of the United States with the Russian czar and the
German kaiser as far as denying citizenship rights in their respective countries. (See
Detailed
Chronology [PDF] and Historical Overview).
Banners, emblazoned with thought-provoking messages, were essential elements of the
picketing campaign. They were the medium for explaining the picket’s purpose and for
embarrassing and pressuring Wilson into action. Many years later Paul
still expressed pride, noting, “Our banners were really beautiful.”
2
The
banners also sometimes inflamed onlookers and became targets of
vandalism. The first of the famous “Russian” banners lasted less than a
day. Pulled away from its bearer, it survived only a few minutes before
the crowd shred it to pieces. The same fate befell the “Kaiser Wilson”
banners. Many of the most effective banners carried quotes lifted directly
from Wilson’s own speeches. Parroting Wilson’s words helped to
highlight the government’s hypocrisy in supporting democracy abroad
while denying its women citizens the right to vote at home. Also, as one
historian noted, the tactic may have helped the suffragists avoid
prosecution under federal espionage and sedition laws during a period of
unprecedented government repression.
3
Even if mob violence was the exception rather than the rule,
underlying tension and intimidation existed on almost any given day.
Suffragist Inez Haynes Irwin wrote of the “slow growth of the crowds; the
circle of little boys who gathered about . . . first, spitting at them, calling
them names, making personal comments; then the gathering of gangs of
young hoodlums who encourage the boys to further insults; then more and
more crowds; more and more insults. . . . Sometimes the crowd would edge nearer and nearer,
until there was but a foot of smothering, terror-fraught space between them and the pickets.”
4
When skirmishes broke out, the police invariably stood and watched, or else they arrested the
women on charges of obstructing traffic.
During World War I,
Virginia Arnold holds a
banner accusing President
Wilson of forgetting to
grant full democracy in this
country while sending
troops abroad to make self-
government possible for the
rest of the world. Harris &
Ewing. August 1917.
About this image
The White House was not the only venue for picketing. Demonstrations also took place
in nearby Lafayette Park, where in August and September 1918, the NWP burned copies of
Wilson’s speeches and his picture in effigy. The U.S. Capitol
and Senate office buildings were also targeted; picketing at the
latter began in October 1918, when the NWP grew tired of
waiting for the Senate to pass a suffrage amendment.
In January 1919 the focus again returned to the White
House with the burning of “watch fires of freedom.” Cauldrons
were set up outside the White House and in Lafayette Park to
burn Wilson’s speeches and pressure him to use his influence to
secure the remaining two votes necessary for Senate passage of
the amendment. Risking arrest, demonstrators kept the fires
burning continuously. (See
Detailed Chronology [PDF] and
Historical Overview).
N
WP “watch fire of freedom” burns
outside the White House. Harris & Ewing.
January 1919.
About this image
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Wilson could not escape the pickets by leaving town. In February 1919 NWP members,
carrying banners reminding him of his pledge to support the suffrage amendment, met him in
Boston upon his return from Europe. The police roughed up the demonstrators before arresting
them. These pickets served eight-day sentences in the Charles Street jail. The next month,
demonstrators were brutally attacked by police, soldiers, and onlookers when they picketed
outside the New York Metropolitan Opera House, where Wilson was speaking.
At great personal cost to their health, safety, and reputations, American suffragists risked
arrest and imprisonment to secure voting rights for women. Through their choice of tactics and
nonviolent protests, they helped to defend for all Americans the right to assembly and freedom of
expression.
Arrests and Imprisonment
NWP activists–arrested, tried, and in many cases imprisoned on charges related to
picketing, speaking at rallies in public parks, and other forms of demonstration–devised another
series of tactics to deal with their experiences in court and in detention. Again,
Alice Paul and
Lucy Burns’s work in the British suffrage movement helped to frame responses in America.
Paul’s Quaker background provided her with a sophisticated view of the connections between
ethical civil disobedience and political action. Burns’s sympathy with labor organizations and the
Left helped develop her responses.
Most important among the strategies used in court–and later in
detention–in either the
District of Columbia jail or Virginia’s Occoquan
Workhouse, was the demand that arrested suffragists be treated as political
prisoners. Arrested on criminal charges of obstructing traffic, NWP activists
emphasized that their assembly on city sidewalks and their silent and
peaceable picketing had been conducted entirely within legal grounds. Under
the leadership of Paul and Burns they began insisting that the courts
acknowledge that the real motivation for their arrests was politically based.
They also placed the blame for the repressive response to their actions
squarely on the Wilson administration.
Beginning in fall 1917, jailed NWP pickets backed up this insistence
on the political nature of their imprisonment with action–or more accurately,
inaction–within the jail and workhouse. Following the lead of Burns, Paul, and
others, imprisoned pickets instituted a campaign of nonviolent, “passive”
resistance. They refused to do their assigned sweatshop sewing and manual
labor. Further, they refused to eat until their political status was acknowledged. Hunger strikes
became one of the most powerful and graphic tools used by the NWP to gain public awareness of
the dire nature of the denial of rights to women.
Vida Milholland in
District of Columbia
j
ail. Harris & Ewing.
July 4, 1917.
About this image
For many of the middle-class and wealthy pickets, jail was a shock. Conditions at both
the District and Virginia facilities were uncomfortable at best. Sanitation was severely lacking.
Bedding went unwashed and was reused by different prisoners for months. Food had little
nutritional value or appeal, and worse, was often riddled with worms or insects. At one point,
jailed suffragists sent a heap of worms removed from their soup to the warden on a spoon.
Most NWP activists came from sheltered, privileged backgrounds or enjoyed a highly
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respectable social status through their education, career, or marriage. Yet on principle and in
defense of civil liberties, many chose to enter jail instead of paying a fine. Imprisonment often
provided them with a firsthand education about how readily those less privileged could find their
rights abridged within the court, police station, workhouse, and jail.
In order to emphasize the “common criminal” status of the NWP prisoners, wardens
incarcerated them with women who had been detained for streetwalking, homelessness, or petty
crime. In a time when Jim Crow racial segregation still prevailed,
wardens also housed white demonstrators with African-American
detainees. The pickets discovered these women had been imprisoned as a
result of their acute poverty or even because they had been subjected to
sexual exploitation or domestic violence.
Doris Stevens, one of the jailed
NWP protesters, observed that the lessons learned about prison conditions
and inequities encouraged many imprisoned suffragists to also turn to
prison reform.
As the process of picketing, arrest, sentencing, and imprisonment
continued from June into late fall 1917, former government leniency and
pardons gave way to more severe sentences. Many of the suffragists
arrested earlier in the campaign received sentences of a few days to a
month, and sentences were sometimes truncated or suspended by pardon.
In the new political climate, however, Alice Paul was sentenced to seven
months, and Lucy Burns to six months. As the suffragists began
demanding political prisoner status, their situations became more threatening. Imprisonment
became more closely synonymous with compromised health and bodily harm.
Lucy Branham protests the
p
olitical imprisonment of
Alice Paul. Harris & Ewing.
1917.
About this image
The dangerous situation inside the detention facilities escalated, peaking in November in
with what became known as the “Night of Terror.” Occoquan Superintendent Raymond
Whittaker threatened prisoners that he would end the picketing, even if it cost some women their
lives. On November 15, 1917, he instigated the use of force by guards against a newly
imprisoned set of pickets, a group that included many core NWP national and state organizers.
Women were beaten, pushed, and bodily carried and thrown into
their cells when they refused to cooperate and attempted to
negotiate with the superintendent. Other means of physical
intimidation also were used.
Dora Lewis was knocked
unconscious and Lucy Burns handcuffed with her arms above
her head.
The next day, 16 of the women began a hunger strike,
including Lewis and Burns. They followed the example set the
previous month by Alice Paul and
Rose Winslow. During her
protest, Paul was subjected to psychiatric evaluation, threatened
with transfer to an institution for the insane, and force-fed. News
of her treatment was leaked outside the facility. When Burns and
Lewis grew weak from refusing food, they, too, were force-fed. Burns had a tube forced up her
nose rather than through her mouth, resulting in bleeding and injury.
Kate Heffelfinger after her release from
Occoquan Workhouse, 1917.
About this image
The assaultive nature of the force-feeding process was by all accounts a torturous
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experience for the women, one that they withstood repeatedly. Verbal techniques of
psychological duress also were used to weaken the women’s resolve. Isolated from one another,
some prisoners were told falsely during their force-feedings that they were the only person still
maintaining the hunger strike–claims that they knew not to believe.
The campaign of civil disobedience and the public outcry over the prisoners’ treatment
led to the release of Paul, Burns, and other suffrage prisoners at the end of November 1917. The
NWP subsequently staged a mass meeting in Washington, D.C., to honor the
women who had
served time in jail or prison. A “Jailed for Freedom” pin, fashioned after one used in Britain, was
affixed as a badge of honor on the formerly imprisoned women attending the meeting. The
arrests, however, continued.
Picketing proceeded at the White House, in front of the U.S. Capitol, and at the
Congressional office buildings. More NWP protesters were imprisoned and participated in
hunger strikes in 1918. The watch fire demonstrations of 1919 put even more women behind bars
for brief sentences. By the time that suffrage was won in 1920, 168 NWP activists had served
time in prison or jail.
The NWP used the experience of imprisoned pickets to
help spread the call for a federal suffrage amendment. Ex-
prisoners began traveling during a determined lobbying
campaign to push the suffrage amendment through Congress. In
February 1919 the “Prison Special” tour began from Union
Station in Washington, D.C.–with former prisoners traveling on a
train called the “Democracy Limited.”
Mass meetings were held around the country–from
Charleston, South Carolina, to New Orleans and Los Angeles,
Denver, Chicago, and many other cities, ending in New York in
March.. Among the 26 speakers on this tour–often outfitted in
prison dress, were veteran NWP organizers Vida Milholland,
Abby Scott Baker, Lucy Branham,
Lucy Burns, and Mabel Vernon as well as the elderly and courageous Mary Nolan–often touted
as the NWP’s “oldest picket.” Their message was well received and they drew large audiences.
The “Prison Special” tour helped create a groundswell of local support for the ratification effort
that began in the states a few months later, following the approval of the 19
Amendment by
Congress in June 1919.
th
Speakers on “Prison Special” tour, San
Francisco, 1919.
About this image
The Library of Congress | American Memory
Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party
12
Notes
1. Linda G. Ford, Iron Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party,
1912-1920 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 127.
2. Ibid., 126.
3. Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 129.
4. Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party ( Fairfax, VA:
Denlinger’s Publishers, 1920; reprint 1977).
