Biographies and photos courtesy of The Library of Congress.
Mary H. Ingham
Mary H. Ingham of Philadelphia, PA and graduate from Bryn Mawr College in 1903, was Chairman of the Pennsylvania Branch of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), and was arrested three times for picketing the White House. The Bryn Mawr Alumnae Quarterly of November 1917 commended the sacrifice she made in picketing the White House and serving her term in the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia. At a meeting at her house after her release from prison over $8,000 was raised for the NWP suffrage campaign.
She was dedicated to the suffrage cause and the NWP as her consistent participation shows. Besides picketing in 1917, she spoke at the event in Lafayette Park on December 16, 1918, when the NWP burned President Wilson’s speeches on democracy to show his hypocrisy towards democracy for women. Mary Ingham burned a speech in which he said, “There is nothing in liberty unless it is translated into definite action in our lives today.” She commented as she tossed the speech into the flame, “In the name of the women of Pennsylvania who are demanding action of the President, I consign these words to the flames.” She participated in the continuing watchfire demonstrations in front of the White House burning the President Wilson’s words, which began shortly after the event in Lafayette Park. On February 9, 1919, two days before a date set for a vote on the 19th Amendment in Congress, Mary Ingham was at the front of a procession of 100 women near the White House, and with Mrs. John Rogers carried a banner which read: “. . . For more than a year the President’s Party has blocked suffrage in Senate. . . . The President is responsible for the betrayal of American Womanhood.” She was arrested that day along with many others. Shortly afterwards, she was part of the nationwide speaking tour by those imprisoned. This train tour, known as the “Prison Special,” was designed to build pressure on the Senate to pass the Amendment.
After the 19th Amendment was passed by Congress, Mary Ingham in her role as NWP Pennsylvania state Chairman was a leader in the ratification campaign in that state. The difficult campaign enlisted the aid of the Governor to help persuade opponents, and every legislator was lobbied. She effectively applied the forces of the Pennsylvania NWP, using press bulletins to keep newspaper attention, and drawing crowds at meetings and legislative sessions. The tri-color badges of the NWP could be seen everywhere in the Capitol. Following the final Pennsylvania ratification vote, a celebratory parade of the tri-color banners marched through the capital city, Harrisburg.
But Pennsylvania was not her only ratification venue; she participated in a protest at the 1920 Republican National Convention in Chicago to bring pressure through the Party to persuade the Republican governors of Vermont and Connecticut to ratify. Her banner read: “The Republican Party has the power to enfranchise women. When will it do so?” Following the nomination of Senator Warren G. Harding as the Republican Presidential nominee, she and others met with him to urge pressure on Republican states to ratify, but to no avail.
She was active in the Women’s Trade Union League and an investment broker.
Sources: Bryn Mawr library exhibits, “Bryn Mawr on the Picket Lines, the Radicals and Activists;” Up Hill with Banners Flying, Irwin, NWP, 1964; and Jailed for Freedom, Stevens, 1995.
Sarah Tarleton Colvin
Mrs. Sarah Tarleton Colvin, of St. Paul, Minn., was a member of the well known Tarleton family of Alabama. Her husband, Dr. A. R. Colvin, was a major in the Army, and acting surgical chief at Fort McHenry during World War I. She was a graduate nurse of the Johns Hopkins training school, and worked as a Red Cross nurse in the United States during the war. She was the Minnesota state chairman of the NWP, and a member of the "Prison Special" nationwide tour of speakers in Feb-Mar 1919. She was arrested in watchfire demonstrations Jan. 1919 and sentenced to two terms of five days each.
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 357.
March 2013
Katharine Rolston Fisher, Washington, D. C., native of Massachusetts. Great-great granddaughter of Artemas Ward, ranking Major General in Revolutionary War. Teacher, social worker and later employee of U. S. War Risk Bureau. She was a prolific writer of prose and verse on suffrage and feminist topics. She was arrested picketing Sept. 13, 1917, and sentenced to 30 days at the Occoquan workhouse.
Examples of her verse:
I watched a river of women
Stream toward the National Capitol
Along its border,
Like a purple flower floating
Moved a young woman, worn, wraithlike.
All eyes alight, keenly observing the marchers
Out there on the curb, she looked so little, so lonely,
Few appeared even to see her,
No one saluted her.
Yet commander was she of the column, its leader,
She was the sprin whence arose that irresistible river of women
Streaming steadily towards the National Capitol.
THE EMPTY CUP
The prison matrons are sewing together for the Red Cross.
The women prisoners are going to bed in two long rows.
Some of the Suffrage pickets lie reading in the dim light.
Through the dark, above the rain, rings out a cry
We listen at the windows (Oh those cries from punishment cells!)
Lucy Burns arises; slips on the coarse blue prison gown.
Over it her swinging hair, red-gold, throws a regal mantle.
She begs the night watch to give the girl water.
One of the matrons leaves her war bandages; we see her hasten to the cell.
The light in it goes out.
The voice despairing cries:
“She has taken away the cup and she will not bring me water.”
Rain pours on the roof. The Suffragists lie awake.
The matrons work busily for the Red Cross.
Katherine Rolston Fisher The Suffragist October 17, 1917
February 2013
Ernestine Hara (Kettler) b. 1896
Kettler was a young Romanian who lived in New York City. She was arrested for picketing Sept., 1917, and sentenced to 30 days in Occoquan workhouse. She remained an ardent feminist her entire life and had a long history of labor and socialist activism. Her involvement with the suffrage struggle, although brief, was an outgrowth of both her feminist beliefs and her ties to political and bohemian circles in New York that began in her teen years. After she was arrested for picketing and spent 30 days in jail, she was tempted to go back on the picket line, but could not stand the thought of going back into the Occoquan Workhouse. She said the food was especially bad and that’s why several women tried to starve themselves. When visiting a fellow suffragist, Peggy Johns, who became sick from the food and was hospitalized, she found Johns dressed and ready to be transferred to a psychopathic facility in Washington, D.C. Kettler quickly gathered other women and they forced their way into the prison superintendent’s office. Kettler says Superintendent Whittaker tore the phone from the wall to keep them from dialing for help, and then called in other prisoners to beat them.
In an interview in the 1970’s Kettler recalled visiting a friend who believed that the picketers were ineffective in getting women the vote. Kettler argued that the picketers did make an impact on government officials because many of the women who were arrested and jailed were the mothers, sisters, wives, or relatives of congressmen and other prominent men in Washington, DC. She remembered how those who were jailed were really "beaten up" and physically injured as a result of their picketing efforts.
(Excerpts taken from “From Parlor to Prison: Five American Suffragists Talk About Their Lives.” Edited by Sherna Gluck)
Virginia Arnold
Miss Virginia Arnold, of North Carolina, was one of six pickets arrested in June of 1917 and was sentenced to three days in District jail after refusing to pay $25 fines for obstructing traffic. They were the first women to serve time for suffrage activities. Her sign scandalized many by comparing President Woodrow Wilson with the German ruler during the First World War. She was one of the organizers for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, serving at one point as the National Executive Secretary. She was in charge of planning conventions and establishing state branches in Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Washington and North Dakota. Prior to engaging in suffrage work, she was a student at George Washington University and Columbia University.
December 2012
Annie Arniel (April 24, 1861-January 7, 1941)
Annie Arniel was among the first suffragists jailed for three days on June 27th, 1917, for picketing the White House – choosing prison rather than pay a fine of $25. A factory worker living in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, she was recruited by Mabel Vernon and Alice Paul for membership in the National Woman’s Party. She served a total of eight jail terms for suffrage protesting and served a total of 103 days, including: 3 days June, 1917; 60 days in the Occoquan prison in Virginia, August-September, 1917 for picketing; 15 days for Lafayette Square meeting, and five sentences of 5 days each in January and February, 1919 for the watchfire demonstrations. During one of her arrests when she was picketing Congress, she was knocked senseless by the police. While picketing she held one of the more notable banners that read: “As our boys are fighting for democracy abroad, is it a crime to ask for democracy in our own country?” She also argued after one of her arrests that “We were good enough to work in the steel plant and help load shells for the battlefields of France, but we are still not good enough to vote it seems. Can anyone see justice in this? We are protesting against the unjust delay of the Senate in passing the Susan B. Anthony suffrage amendment and why shouldn’t we? She said the rations served in prison made her so weak, she fainted for the first time in her life.
Portions taken from: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 355.
November 2012
Katharine A. Morey
Katharine A. Morey of Brookline, Mass., was an officer of the Massachusetts State Branch of the NWP. She was the daughter of NWP organizer and state suffrage activist Agnes H. Morey. As state chairman, she was in charge of introducing the Woman’s Party Bill for Equal Rights. Katharine Morey worked as an organizer in the election campaign of 1916 in Kansas and frequently assisted at NWP national headquarters in Washington, D.C. She and Lucy Burns were the first suffragists to be arrested for picketing at the White House, and she served three days in June 1917. In February 1919 she was arrested again in Boston demonstration against President Woodrow Wilson and was sentenced to eight days in the Charles St. Jail.
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 365.
October 2012
Minnie Quay
Minnie Quay of Salt Lake City, Utah, was arrested Nov. 10, 1917, while picketing the White House in Washington, D.C., and sentenced to 30 days in District Jail. She was sent instead to the Occoquan Workhouse and was there during the "Night of Terror," Nov. 15, 1917, during which guards used violence toward imprisoned protestors.
September 2012
Mary A. Nolan
Mrs. Mary A. Nolan of Jacksonville, Florida, was often described as one of the oldest suffragists active on NWP picket lines. Of Irish descent, Nolan was born in Virginia and educated at the convent of Mont de Chantal in West Virginia. As a young woman she worked as a teacher and leader in the Southern library movement. She was also prominent in Confederate organizations and a suffrage pioneer. In 1917 she joined the NWP and came to Washington, D.C., to picket. She was arrested on November 10, 1917, and sentenced to six days in District Jail, but was actually sent to Occoquan Workhouse. She was there for the so-called "Night of Terror" November 15, 1917, during which guards turned violent toward imprisoned protesters. In January 1919, she was arrested many times during the Watchfire demonstrations outside theWhite House, and was sentenced to 24 hours in jail. She was the oldest suffrage prisoner. She participated in the nationwide "Prison Special" tour in which NWP activists traveled from city to city speaking of their experiences in jail.
August 2012
Rose Winslow (d. 1977)
Winslow’s NWP activism is emblematic of the somewhat uneasy role of working-class women and labor rights advocates in the suffrage movement, as well as the NWP’s stated–but imperfectly realized–desire to reach out to women across the social spectrum. Winslow differed with Alice Paul over the former’s desire for outreach to male miners and factory workers and whether the NWP program was too focused on upper- and middle-class women.
Winslow brought her speaking and organizing powers first to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) and then to the NWP by addressing gatherings on the streets, in union halls, and at suffrage rallies. In February 1914 she and Doris Stevens spoke at a mass meeting for working women, after which a contingent of working women marched to the White House to meet with Woodrow Wilson on suffrage rights. That same year, Winslow joined Lucy Burns as leaders of the CU campaign in California to urge voters to oppose Democratic congressional candidates. Later, she worked similarly with other organizers in Wyoming during the electoral campaigns of 1916.
Winslow, like Inez Milholland and many of the other speakers sent out by Alice Paul on extensive speaking tours, displayed great energy at the podium or on the platform, but suffered privately from periodic collapse and exhaustion. Paul became irritated with Winslow when she became incapacitated, despite her history of ill-health. Demonstrating persistency and endurance was, after all, part of the NWP strategy.
Winslow was a leading demonstrator on the picket lines in the 1917 silent protests at the White House in Washington, D. C. She subsequently served time in the District jail and the Occoquan Workhouse.
In October 1917 Winslow and Alice Paul combined forces to set examples by refusing to eat or do work while they were imprisoned. Their actions demonstrated that they were political prisoners who refused to be classified and treated as criminals by the courts for exercising their First Amendment right to public assembly. Weakened by their hunger strike, Winslow and Paul were subjected to force-feedings. Their determination helped inspire other suffragists to perform acts of civil disobedience–defying court authority to convict them on false charges and placing even more pressure on the Wilson White House to accede to suffrage demands.
July 2012
Dora Lewis (b. 1862?)
June 2012
Lucy Gwynne Branham (1892 -1966)
May 2012
Doris Stevens (1888 [1892?] -1963)Over the years, Stevens held several important NWP leadership positions, including membership on the executive committee. She served as vice chairman of NWP’s New York branch, spearheaded the NWP Women for Congress campaign in 1924, and worked in states where female candidates were among contenders for office. She also served as Alva Belmont’s personal assistant.
Stevens was arrested for picketing at the White House in the summer of 1917 and served three days of her 60-day sentence at Occoquan Workhouse before receiving a pardon. She was arrested again in the NWP demonstration at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in March 1919. Stevens published the quintessential insider account of imprisonment of NWP activists, Jailed for Freedom, in 1920.
April 2012
Matilda YoungSource: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 371.
March 2012
Beulah Amidon
Mary Church TerrellThroughout her life she worked to engage women in the political process, and to eliminate Jim Crow laws. Notably, she was instrumental in eliminating segregation policies in the District of Columbia. She lived to see the Supreme Court rule in Brown vs. the Board of Education, and died shortly afterwards at the age of 90.
January 2012
Mrs. Helena Hill WeedSource: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 369.
Matilda Hall Gardner (1871-1954)
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 359; Inez Haynes Gillmore, The Story of the Woman’s Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), 466.
Mary Gertrude Fendall (1889-1971)
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 358.
Abby Scott Baker (1871-1944)
Baker traveled the country as part of the CU’s “Suffrage Special” train tour of western states in April-May 1916. The envoys set off with fanfare from Union Station in Washington, D.C., and Baker was in charge of handling the press for the tour. The support that she helped raise from women in states that had already granted women’s suffrage culminated in a June 1916 meeting in Chicago to form what was at first called the Woman’s Party of Western Voters, or Woman’s Party, for short (later, the NWP). When the NWP was more formally organized in relation to the CU in March 1917, Baker was elected to the NWP executive committee and served as its press chairman (1917-18) and political chairman (1917; 1919-21).
Baker was among the first demonstrators to picket the White House; she was arrested in September 1917 and sentenced to 60 days in the Occoquan Workhouse. In February-March 1919, she served as publicity manager and speaker for the “Prison Special,” a three-week lecture tour by NWP activists who spoke to packed audiences about their jail experiences in an effort to generate support for the suffrage cause.
Baker was an important lobbyist during the key years (1917-20) that the NWP pressured for passage of what became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Known as the diplomat of the NWP, Baker was a significant presence in the organization’s ongoing tactic of asserting personal influence upon leading authorities in public and private life. When the NWP’s patriotism was challenged, she reminded critics that her three sons were fighting in World War I. In the midst of the ratification process for the 19th Amendment, Baker was among the NWP members who attended the Democratic National Convention of 1920 in San Francisco and successfully brokered a pro-suffrage plank as part of the party platform. She subsequently lobbied the presidential candidates from both political parties, James M. Cox and Warren G. Harding, to support the women’s rights cause.
After suffrage was achieved, Baker became a member of the NWP’s Committee on International Relations and the Women’s Consultative Committee of the League of Nations. She also represented the NWP at the League’s 1935 international conferences in Geneva where the issue of equal rights was discussed.
Sarah Tarleton Colvin
Mrs. Sarah Tarleton Colvin, of St. Paul, Minn., was a member of the well known Tarleton family of Alabama. Her husband, Dr. A. R. Colvin, was a major in the Army, and acting surgical chief at Fort McHenry during World War I. She was a graduate nurse of the Johns Hopkins training school, and worked as a Red Cross nurse in the United States during the war. She was the Minnesota state chairman of the NWP, and a member of the "Prison Special" nationwide tour of speakers in Feb-Mar 1919. She was arrested in watchfire demonstrations Jan. 1919 and sentenced to two terms of five days each.
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 357.
August 2011
Catherine Flanagan
Catherine Flanagan of Hartford, Conn., was a state and national organizer for the National Woman’s Party. She was formerly secretary for the Conn. Woman Suffrage Association (CWSA). Her father came to the United States as a political exile because of his efforts in the movement for Irish freedom. She decided to travel to Washington on her vacation and participated in the picketing at the White House in August of 1917. During the second week, the women were attacked by the crowd and their banners were taken from them and torn apart. The women refused to disperse, were arrested for disrupting traffic and sentenced to 30 days at the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Va.
While members of the Conn. Woman Suffrage Association condemned Flanagan for the picketing, CWSA member Mrs.Thomas N. Hepburn (mother of actress Katherine Hepburn) defended them. “I admire Miss Flanagan very much for being willing to go to jail for her convictions, “ said Hepburn. “It is more than most people could even conceive of doing for an ideal…If she prefers to spend her vacation working to make our own country safe for democracy…it behooves those who are less public spirited to try to comprehend her unselfish devotion.” Mrs. M. Tuscan Bennett, treasurer of the CWSA, told the Hartford Courant the same day, “We are indeed in a sad state of affairs in this country when the government uses its strong arm to protest disorderly mobs in their cowardly assault upon American women who are still fighting after 50 years for a principle which was held to be a self-evident truth nearly a century and a half ago: namely that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Flanagan, after arriving back in Connecticut, commented to reporters, “I am perfectly willing to go back to the picket line. I feel that it is a little thing to do toward the accomplishment of such a great purpose, especially since it seems to be the only thing left for us to do now.” She was so revered by her fellow suffragists that when Connecticut ratified the 19th Amendment, she was asked to present the historic document to the U-S Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby.
July 2011
Florence Bayard Hilles (1865-1954)
Florence Bayard Hilles, of Newcastle, Del., was the daughter of Thomas Bayard, American ambassador to Great Britain and secretary of state under President Grover Cleveland. She became involved in the suffrage movement after hearing Mabel Vernon speak. She realized that Vernon was saying what she believed in – yet she was doing nothing about it. They quickly became good friends. Hilles gave her time, her money and her car – the “Votes for Women Flyer” to the cause. She was chairman of the Delaware Branch of the National Women’s Party and member of the national executive committee. One of the “Silent Sentinels” who picketed the White House, she was arrested on July 13, 1917, and sentenced to 60 days in Occoquan Workhouse. She was pardoned by President Wilson after serving three days of her term. The library at the Sewall-Belmont House, is named after her.
Excerpts from Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 361. Portrait: 1916. Copied from original in the collection of the Jewish Historical Society of Delaware Archives, Sally Grinns Collection.
June 2011
Maud Younger (1870-1936)
Maud Younger was among the NWP leaders who came from upper-class circumstances but dentified with working-class life. She was anindependently wealthy socialite in San Francisco when, at age 30, she witnessed effective settlement house work in New York City and became a convert to the power of grassroots reform. She also worked briefly in New York as a waitress to acquire personal experience in the service sector. Younger returned to California, where she organized San Francisco's first waitress union (1908) and was instrumental in the passage of the state's eight-hour-day work law.
Since Younger viewed working and voting rights as closely related issues, she helped found the Wage Earners' Equal Suffrage League for Working Women, spoke on the vote in union halls around the state, and encouraged men to support the women's cause. A master of showmanship, she created publicity for state suffrage with a Wage Earner's Equal Suffrage League float in the 1911 Labor Day parade in San Francisco. In that year she helped lobby for passage of a woman suffrage amendment to the California constitution.
In 1913 Younger brought her considerable organizing experience to the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage (CU) and later the National Woman's Party (NWP). Working closely with Alice Paul, she soon emerged as one of the NWP's most effective orators and was a leading presence at several major NWP events. She was a keynote speaker at the NWP's founding convention in Chicago in June 1916, and later that year spoke at the memorial service for Inez Milholland. In 1917 Younger traveled throughout the nation to speak about the NWP's picketing of the White House and the arrest and imprisonment of demonstrators. She chaired the NWP's lobbying committee (1917-19) and legislative committee (1919), and described her experiences in a 1919 McCall's Magazine article “Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist.” After 1920 Younger worked with the Women's Trade Union League and then focused her activism on the NWP campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment. She served as congressional chairman of the NWP from 1921 until her death.
May 2011
Anne Kelton Wiley (1877-1964)
Anna Kelton Wiley was born in Oakland, California in 1877. She graduated from George Washington University, Washington, DC, in 1897 and worked in various government offices. She married Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry, in 1911; they had two children, Harvey, Jr. and John P.
Anna Wiley was active in various Washington organizations for fifty-five years. As a suffragist she was arrested for picketing the White House on November 10, 1917, and sentenced to 15 days in District Jail; she appealed her case and it was later upheld by a higher court. She served as Chairman of the National Woman's Party (1930-1932, 1940-1942) as well as editor (1940-1945) of its periodical, Equal Rights. She belonged to over forty organizations, as diverse as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Consumers' League. Using her knowledge of and interest in politics, she lobbied for legislation on behalf of many of these organizations. Anna Kelton Wiley and Rheta Childe Dorr led a delegation of women to a meeting with President Wilson. Mr. Wilson again said he supported leaving suffrage to states and became annoyed when the women pressed him about the possibility of a Constitutional Amendment. The exchange reportedly fueled the growing view that women in the Congressional Union were “hecklers” and “women howlers.”
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 370.
Photo Source: Studio portrait of Anal Kelton Wiley, seated, in embroidered apron, with sons John Preston Wiley (1914-1998) and Harvey W. Wiley, Jr. (1912-1951), in sailor suits.
April 2011
Sue Shelton White (1887-1943)
Sue Shelton White, of Jackson, Tenn., was state chairman of the National Woman’s Party and one of the editors of The Suffragist weekly newspaper. She was a court and convention reporter for ten years and in 1918 was appointed by the Governor of Tennessee to the State Commission for the Blind. She was active with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution, as well as the Federation of Women's Clubs and the Parent Teachers' Association. She was arrested Feb. 9, 1919, and served five days in District Jail for participating in a watchfire demonstration. She soon after participated in the NWP's "Prison Special" tour of the United States. She is largely credited with helping win ratification of the 19th Amendment by helping win passage in the Tennessee legislature- the 36th and clinching state for ratification. Shelton eventually earned her law degree in 1923 and helped to draft the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She soon left the NWP after being discouraged by President Hoover’s failure to support the Amendment.
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 370.
Photo Source: Sue Shelton White, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, (mnwp 158006). Photographer: Harris&Ewing [c. 1920]
Lucy Burns (1879-1966)
Born in Brooklyn, New York, to an Irish Catholic family, Burns was a brilliant student of language and linguistics. She studied at Vassar College and Yale University in the United States and at the University of Berlin in Germany (1906-8). While a student at Oxford College in Cambridge, England, Burns witnessed the militancy of the British suffrage movement.
Burns set her academic goals aside and in 1909 became an activist with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). She perfected the art of street speaking, was arrested repeatedly, and was imprisoned four times. From 1910 to 1912 she worked as a suffrage organizer in Scotland.
Burns was a driving force behind the picketing of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration in Washington, D.C., beginning in January 1917. Six months later, she and Dora Lewis–targeting the attention of visiting Russian envoys–attracted controversy by prominently displaying a banner outside the White House declaring that America was not a free democracy as long as women were denied the vote. When Burns participated in a similar action with Katharine Morey later the same month, they were arrested for obstructing traffic. The banners displeased President Wilson and escalated the administration’s response to the picketing.
Burns was arrested and imprisoned six times. Declaring that suffragists were political prisoners, she was among those in the Occoquan Workhouse who instigated hunger strikes in October 1917 and were subsequently placed in solitary confinement. Jailed again when protesting the treatment of the imprisoned Alice Paul, Burns joined Paul and others in another round of Occoquan hunger strikes. Burns was in Occoquan for what became known as the “Night of Terror” on November 15, 1917, during which she was beaten and her arms were handcuffed above her head in her cell. Particularly brutal force-feeding soon followed. After her release, Burns commenced nationwide speaking tours. Unlike Paul, who remained active in the NWP until her death, Burns retired from public campaigns with the success of the 19th Amendment. She spent the rest of her life working with the Catholic Church.
Burns met Alice Paul in a London police station after both were arrested during a suffrage demonstration outside Parliament. Their alliance was powerful and long-lasting. Returning to the United States (Paul in 1910, Burns in 1912), the two women worked first with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) as leaders of its Congressional Committee. In April 1913 they founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), which evolved into the NWP. Burns organized campaigns in the West (1914, 1916), served as NWP legislative chairman in Washington, D.C., and, beginning in April 1914, edited the organization’s weekly journal, The Suffragist.
February 2011
Rheta Childe Door (1868 - 1948)
Born in Nebraska, Rheta Childe Dorr earned a reputation as a disobedient child, sneaking out of the house to attend a suffragist rally held by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when she was 12. Her parents discovered her actions only after reading in the paper the list of women who had joined the National Woman Suffrage Association. She had used her only silver dollar to pay dues. She later pursued journalism, but was shocked to learn that editors refused to put her on the staff simply because she was a woman. While covering the coronation of a new king in Norway, she became acquainted with prominent British suffragists. She later decided to go underground to learn and write about the experiences of everyday workers, later learning that her stories were given a male byline. In 1910 she wrote, “What Eight Million Women Want” about suffrage clubs, trade unions, and consumers leagues in Europe and the United States. That led her to assisting British suffragist, Emmeline Pankhurst, in writing Pankhurst’s autobiography, “My Own Story.” She was selected to be the editor of the new weekly suffrage newspaper, “The Suffragist,” the first of which appeared on November 15, 1913. It was the official publication of those trying to influence national legislation for the cause. She once explained that the idea of the paper was to bring to the attention of women all over the country that they may have a voice in government by making it a political issue and electing men who are favorable to equal suffrage. She eventually quit her position as editor over frustration over suffragist Alice Paul’s autocratic manner.
January 2011
Alison Turnbull Hopkins (1880 - 1951)
Alison Turnbull Hopkins of Morristown, N.J., was New Jersey state chairman of the National Woman’s Party and a member of the NWP executive committee in 1917, as well as president of various women's clubs. Her husband was a supporter of President Woodrow Wilson and he served on the Democratic National Committee in 1916. She was arrested July 14, 1917, for picketing the White House, and sentenced to 60 days in the Occoquan Workhouse. She was pardoned by President Wilson after three days at the request of her husband. Hopkins, however, claimed that Wilson had acted only to save himself political embarrassment and stood alone at the White House gates with a sign reading, “We ask not pardon for ourselves but justice for all American women.”
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 361-62.
December 2010
Lavinia Lloyd Dock (1858 - 1956)
Lavinia Lloyd Dock was a nurse and social reformer born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1858. From a well-to-do family, she chose to train as a nurse and after serving as a visiting nurse among the poor she compiled the first manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses (1890). She devoted her life to improving the health of the poor and the profession of nursing. She gave up nursing around the age of 50, but dedicated her energies to other causes such as improved working conditions, birth control, and women’s right to vote. She was jailed briefly three times for taking part in suffrage demonstrations. Some say her courageous stand for womens’ suffrage and womens’ rights was her greatest contribution to nursing. She felt if nursing was going to be the profession that the early leaders envisioned, nurses would need the power and respect that only gender equality could offer. She is quoted in the NLN publication, “Open Mind” (1996), “We owe the existence of our profession to the womens’ movement. We owe it all that we are, all that we have of opportunity and advancement.” (Forest, n.d.)
November 2010
Pauline Forstall Colclough Adams (1874 - 1957)
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1874, suffragist and local activist Pauline Forstall Colclough Adams was living in Brunswick County, North Carolina, by 1898, when she married Norfolk physician Walter J. Adams. They returned to Norfolk, where Walter established a medical practice and Pauline gave birth to their two sons. She hosted an influential meeting at her home on 18 November 1910, when the Norfolk Equal Suffrage League was organized. Adams served as the first president of the Norfolk league (a National American Woman Suffrage Association affiliate) and was elected twice more before declining to run again. Unlike her fellow Virginia suffragists, Adams advocated a militant approach to winning the vote for women, shunning the primarily educational activities of the Norfolk league to speak in the city’s streets and to march in Washington, D.C., during President Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural parade. Her opinions and actions prompted a serious rift in the conservative Norfolk league and a reprimand from state league headquarters in Richmond.
Adams joined the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, a more militant group, and after it was renamed the National Woman’s Party, she served as president of the Norfolk branch from 1917 to 1920. With the outbreak of World War I, Adams sprang into action, calling in April 1917 for the formation of a Woman’s Home Guard in Norfolk. Unlike the Equal Suffrage League, which suspended political activities in favor of charitable work, the National Woman’s Party continued the fight for suffrage during the war. As local NWP president, Adams led the women’s section of Norfolk’s Preparedness Parade and sold war bonds and stamps at local hotels. On 4 September 1917, Adams was one of thirteen picketers arrested for “flaunting their banners” in front of President Woodrow Wilson’s reviewing stand before a selective service parade. When given a choice between sixty days in jail or a $25 fine, the suffragists as a whole chose prison and were sent to the Occoquan workhouse in Fairfax County, Va. She was arrested again at a watchfire demonstration on Feb. 9, 1919, but was released on account of lack of evidence. She was one of the speakers on the "Prison Special" tour of Feb-Mar 1919.
After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, Adams looked for new challenges. She passed the bar examination in 1921 and became the second woman to practice law in Norfolk. Pauline Adams died on 10 September 1957 and was buried in Norfolk.
October 2010
Anne Martin (1875 - 1951)
Anne Henrietta Martin was born into a large Irish-German family in Empire, Nevada, near Carson City. She was the daughter of a prominent Populist politician and businessman. Martin was well-educated at a school for girls and at the University of Nevada, from which she graduated in 1894. She earned a second bachelor’s and a master’s degree in history from Stanford University (1896, 1897). She was also a superb athlete and equestrian, excelling especially in tennis and golf. Martin founded and headed the History Department at the University of Nevada in 1897 and from 1899 to 1901 continued her graduate studies in New York, London, and Leipzig.
After receiving an inheritance from her share of the family business following her father’s death in 1901, Martin traveled in Asia and Europe. She later said that the dismissal of her business acumen in favor of her brothers’ had made her a feminist. While in England, Martin became interested in Fabianism and joined in the militant British suffrage movement. In 1910 she was arrested for participating in a demonstration in London.
In 1911 Martin returned to Nevada, where she became the press secretary and then the president for the Nevada Equal Franchise Society (NEFS, later the Nevada Woman’s Civic League). Under her leadership, the NEFS lobbied successfully for ratification of a state woman suffrage amendment in 1914.
Martin was a member of the executive committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) as well as the executive committee of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU). She was chosen as the NWP’s first chairman at its founding convention in Chicago in June 1916 (when it began as the Woman’s Party of Western Voters, comprised of women from the 12 suffrage states).
Martin was among the organizers who targeted congressional campaigns in the fall of 1916. She traveled and spoke widely to sway voters to boycott the Democratic Party unless it began to facilitate congressional action on a federal suffrage amendment. Martin was selected vice-chairman and legislative chairman of the NWP when it formally merged with the CU in March 1917. Based in Washington, D.C., from 1916 to 1918, she coordinated work in various congressional districts and organized pressure from the state level on national legislators. With the advent of World War I, Martin argued with U.S. senators that woman suffrage should be passed in order to allow women to respond to the war effort. In July 1917 she was arrested for picketing at the White House. Martin was among the women who argued in court that they had a right to stand peacefully outside the White House gates. She told the court, “We stand on the Bill of Rights.”
Following ratification of the 19th Amendment, Martin moved to Carmel, California, with her mother. Martin died in Carmel in 1951.
September 2010
Mabel Vernon (1883 - 1975)
Mabel Vernon was born in Wilmington, Delaware. Her father was editor and publisher of the Wilmington Daily Republican. Part of a large Quaker-Presbyterian family, she went to Swarthmore with Alice Paul and graduated in 1906. During her college career she won awards as a debater. Vernon taught Latin and German in a Pennsylvania high school before attending a National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) conference in Philadelphia in 1912. She later returned to school and earned a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University in 1924.
At Paul’s invitation, Vernon worked as a regional fund-raiser and recruiter for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) shortly after its formal organization in 1913. The following year she led the CU campaign against Democratic congressional candidates in Nevada along with Anne Martin. She soon headed the push to establish state branches in several western states. When the CU asked Sara Bard Field and other suffrage envoys to travel cross-country by automobile in 1915, Vernon worked as the advance person, organizing events and meetings in several major cities. She joined Alice Paul and others in testifying for woman suffrage before the House Judiciary Committee at the end of that year.
Vernon has been described by her fellow activists as the first, and perhaps the most outstanding, of NWP organizers. She was named secretary of the newly formed NWP in June 1916. The following autumn, Vernon worked as a regional organizer, doing street speaking and holding rallies to encourage citizens not to support the reelection of legislators opposed to a federal suffrage amendment. She participated in the 1919 “Prison Special” tour, which did much to dispel popular fears of NWP militancy and win sympathy for the sacrifices that NWP activists had made for the suffrage cause. During the two years leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Vernon reprised her role as a regional organizer, working especially in Georgia, Kentucky, and Delaware.
Vernon was also notable for her audacious demonstrations during major presidential addresses–calling out to President Wilson during his Independence Day speech in 1916. After Wilson’s closely contested reelection in November 1916, she and other NWP activists secured front-row gallery seats for his annual address to Congress. During the speech, Vernon and the others unfurled a suffrage banner from inside Vernon’s coat, an action that won publicity across the country. Vernon was also among the first group of NWP women sentenced to brief terms in the District jail when she was charged with obstructing traffic while picketing the White House in June 1917.Vernon remained active in the NWP in the 1920s and served as its executive secretary.
August 2010
Anita Pollitzer (1894 - 1975)
Anita Lily Pollitzer was from Charleston, South Carolina, where her father worked as a cotton exporter and civic reformer. Her mother, Clara Guinzburg Pollitzer, was the daughter of an immigrant rabbi from Prague. Pollitzer graduated from Hunter College and taught German before marrying freelance press agent Elie Charlier Edson in 1928. Edson encouraged Pollitzer in her career and her studies.
Pollitzer also trained as an artist in New York City and studied with Alfred Stieglitz. She graduated from the School of Practical Arts at the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1916, where she was a good friend of Georgia O’Keeffe. Pollitzer also earned a master’s degree in international law from Columbia University in 1933.
Pollitzer turned to the suffrage cause while at home on a vacation break from school. Her two sisters, Mabel and Carrie Pollitzer, as well as two aunts, were active in the local suffrage movement. Her family was supportive of her move to Washington after her graduation from college to work for the NWP.
Pollitzer became a stalwart of both the suffrage and equal rights movements. She traveled extensively across the country to speak, organize, and participate in picketing. As a young activist, Pollitzer was praised by her co-workers and NWP head Alice Paul for her ever-sunny disposition and effectiveness in fund-raising and speaking. Pollitzer had a personal hand in the lobbying effort that helped secure the ratification of the 19th Amendment. In August 1920, the night before a special session of the Tennessee legislature voted on the amendment, she dined with legislator Harry T. Burn. The next day, Burn cast the critical vote making Tennessee the 36th and decisive state to ratify the amendment.
Pollitzer’s career in the NWP extended well after suffrage was won. She began a long-time stint as a member of the NWP executive committee in 1921 and served as national secretary (1921-26), national congressional secretary, Congressional Committee vice-chairman, national vice-chairman (1927-38), and national chairman (1945-49). When Alice Paul proposed the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment in Seneca Falls in 1923, Pollitzer seconded the proposal. She died in Queens, New York, at the home of a caretaker.
July 2010
Lillian Ascough
Lillian Ascough of Detroit, Mich., served as the Connecticut State Chairman of the National Womens Party. She studied for the concert stage in London and Paris. But she abandoned the concert stage to devote time to suffrage. She was sentenced to fifteen days in jail in August of 1918, following a Lafayette Square demonstration, and sentenced to five days in February of 1919, following a watchfire demonstration. She was a speaker in the "Prison Special" tour of Feb-Mar 1919.
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 355.
June 2010
Lucy EwingLucy Ewing, of Chicago, Illinois was the Chairman of the National Woman's Party, who served a thirty day sentence in the Government Workhouse at Occoquan for holding a banner in front of the Executive Mansion, demanding the enfranchisement of women. She was niece of Adlai Stevenson, vice president of the U.S. under Grover Cleveland, and officer in the Illinois branch of the NWP. She was arrested picketing Aug. 17, 1917 and sentenced to 30 days in the Occoquan Workhouse and was among those speakers who toured with the "Prison Special" in Feb-Mar 1919.
May 2010
Kate Heffelfinger
Kate Heffelfinger, of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, was an art student and NWP activist. She was sentenced to six months in District Jail for picketing Oct. 15, 1917; another month was later added to her sentence for a previous offense. In August 1918, she was sentenced to 15 days for participating in a Lafayette Square meeting; in January 1919 she was sentenced to five days for participation in a watchfire demonstration.
To the left is a photograph of a woman escorting Kate Heffelfinger, wrapped in blanket, outside near a car, after release from Occoquan Prison, ca. 1917.
April 2010
Minnie Quay
Minnie Quay of Salt Lake City, Utah, was arrested Nov. 10, 1917, while picketing the White House in Washington, D.C., and sentenced to 30 days in District Jail. She was sent instead to the Occoquan Workhouse and was there during the "Night of Terror," Nov. 15, 1917, during which guards used violence toward imprisoned protestors.
March 2010
Mary A. Nolan
Mrs. Mary A. Nolan of Jacksonville, Florida, was often described as one of the oldest suffragists active on NWP picket lines. Of Irish descent, Nolan was born in Virginia and educated at the convent of Mont de Chantal in West Virginia. As a young woman she worked as a teacher and leader in the Southern library movement. She was also prominent in Confederate organizations and a suffrage pioneer. In 1917 she joined the NWP and came to Washington, D.C., to picket. She was arrested on November 10, 1917, and sentenced to six days in District Jail, but was actually sent to Occoquan Workhouse. She was there for the so-called "Night of Terror" November 15, 1917, during which guards turned violent toward imprisoned protesters. In January 1919, she was arrested many times during the Watchfire demonstrations outside the White House, and was sentenced to 24 hours in jail. She was the oldest suffrage prisoner. She participated in the nationwide "Prison Special" tour in which NWP activists traveled from city to city speaking of their experiences in jail.
February 2010
Rose Winslow (d. 1977)
Born Ruza Wenclawska in Poland, Rose Winslow was brought to the United States as an infant with her immigrant parents. Winslow’s father worked as a coal miner and steelworker in Pennsylvania. She began working as a mill girl in the hosiery industry in Pittsburgh at age 11 and was also employed as a shop girl in Philadelphia, but was forced to quit work temporarily at age 19 when she contracted tuberculosis, leaving her disabled for the next two years. Winslow became a factory inspector and a trade union organizer in New York City with the National Consumers’ League and the National Women’s Trade Union League. In addition to her labor and suffrage activism, she was an actress and poet.
Winslow’s NWP activism is emblematic of the somewhat uneasy role of working-class women and labor rights advocates in the suffrage movement, as well as the NWP’s stated–but imperfectly realized–desire to reach out to women across the social spectrum. Winslow differed with Alice Paul over the former’s desire for outreach to male miners and factory workers and whether the NWP program was too focused on upper- and middle-class women.
Winslow brought her speaking and organizing powers first to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) and then to the NWP by addressing gatherings on the streets, in union halls, and at suffrage rallies. In February 1914 she and Doris Stevens spoke at a mass meeting for working women, after which a contingent of working women marched to the White House to meet with Woodrow Wilson on suffrage rights. That same year, Winslow joined Lucy Burns as leaders of the CU campaign in California to urge voters to oppose Democratic congressional candidates. Later, she worked similarly with other organizers in Wyoming during the electoral campaigns of 1916.
Winslow, like Inez Milholland and many of the other speakers sent out by Alice Paul on extensive speaking tours, displayed great energy at the podium or on the platform, but suffered privately from periodic collapse and exhaustion. Paul became irritated with Winslow when she became incapacitated, despite her history of ill-health. Demonstrating persistency and endurance was, after all, part of the NWP strategy.
Winslow was a leading demonstrator on the picket lines in the 1917 silent protests at the White House in Washington, D. C. She subsequently served time in the District jail and the Occoquan Workhouse.
In October 1917 Winslow and Alice Paul combined forces to set examples by refusing to eat or do work while they were imprisoned. Their actions demonstrated that they were political prisoners who refused to be classified and treated as criminals by the courts for exercising their First Amendment right to public assembly. Weakened by their hunger strike, Winslow and Paul were subjected to force-feedings. Their determination helped inspire other suffragists to perform acts of civil disobedience–defying court authority to convict them on false charges and placing even more pressure on the Wilson White House to accede to suffrage demands.
January 2010
Dora Lewis (b. 1862?)
Often referred to as “Mrs. Lawrence Lewis” in suffrage literature, Dora Lewis was from an influential Philadelphia family. She was part of the earliest core of activists who worked with Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others in the 1913-15 period of internal conflict–between the members of Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage (CU) who favored more innovative methods over the more staid leaders of NAWSA. Lewis was a member of the initial executive committee of the NAWSA Congressional Committee in 1913; she remained a central figure throughout the NWP’s major public demonstration campaigns.
Lewis was among the outspoken hunger-striking suffragist prisoners and she received some of the most brutal treatment at the hands of wardens at the District jail and the Occoquan Workhouse. During the infamous “Night of Terror” of November 15, 1917, at Occoquan, Lewis was hurled bodily into her cell. She was knocked unconscious and feared dead when she collided headfirst against her iron bed frame. Lewis and Lucy Burns were initial leaders of the hunger strike in Occoquan; both grew so weak that they were held down by attendants and force-fed through a tube.
Lewis was the primary speaker at a protest held in memory of Inez Milholland at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., on August 6, 1918. When she was dragged away and arrested before finishing her first sentences–much to the consternation of the gathered crowd–other speakers rose to take her place. One after another, they too were arrested.
Lewis began the NWP’s watch fire protest when she set to flames copies of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches in a demonstration New Year’s Day, 1919. She was arrested for her part in the actions. In the summer of 1919, Lewis was among NWP organizers who worked in Georgia to try (unsuccessfully) to secure that state’s support in the ratification process for the 19th Amendment. When Georgia repudiated ratification, she moved on to Kentucky, which ratified the amendment in January 1920. Lewis also served as treasurer and as member of the executive committee of the NWP.
December 2009
Lucy Gwynne Branham (1892 -1966)
Lucy Gwynne Branham was born in Kempsville, Virginia, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a suffrage activist and a physician. A student of history, Branham graduated from Washington College in Maryland and earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. While teaching in Florida, she received a Carnegie Hero Medal for saving a swimmer from drowning in the ocean.
Branham and her mother (also named Lucy) embraced the cause of a federal suffrage amendment despite antagonism from some members of their southern-based family. The younger Lucy worked as a NWP organizer in Utah during the elections of 1916, when the party urged voters to boycott Democratic Party candidates because of their failure to endorse woman suffrage. She was arrested in the NWP campaign of silent picketing at the White House in September 1917 and served two months in the Occoquan Workhouse and the District jail. (Her mother also was arrested for her part in the watch fire demonstrations in January 1919 and served three days in the District jail.)
In 1918 Branham joined the huge push by the NWP to lobby for passage of a federal amendment in the Senate and focused her organizing efforts in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. That same year, Branham played a prominent role in the Lafayette Park demonstrations. During one such protest, she held aloft a message from President Woodrow Wilson before “consigning” his “empty words” into a fire, declaring, “We want action, not words.” Branham was a participant in the “Prison Special” tour of 1919, during which NWP women who had been imprisoned traveled to cities around the country to talk of their experiences, often wearing prison garb when they spoke.
After the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Branham headed the Inez Milholland Memorial Fund Committee, which created an ongoing endowment fund for the NWP. She taught briefly at Columbia University, worked with the American Friends Service Committee, and became executive secretary of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia (1926-30). Fluent in French, Russian, and German, she worked with the World Woman’s Party in Geneva and lobbied the League of Nations on equal rights issues.
In the late 1950s she and her elderly mother lived at Sewall-Belmont House while Branham served on the NWP’s Congressional Committee to lobby for the Equal Rights Amendment. After her mother’s death, Branham suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for several years near her home in Delaware. Alice Paul, Mabel Vernon, and Edith Goode visited her there shortly before her death in July 1966.
November 2009
Doris Stevens (1888 [1892?] -1963)
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Doris Stevens graduated from Oberlin College in 1911. She worked as a teacher and social worker in Ohio and Michigan before she became a regional organizer with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In New York, she was friends with leading members of the Greenwich Village radical scene, including Louise Bryant and John Reed. In 1914 Stevens became a full-time organizer, as well as executive secretary, for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in Washington, D.C. After working on the East Coast, including in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1913-14, she moved west to Colorado (1914), and then to California (1915). She organized the first convention of women voters at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and the NWP election campaign in California in 1916.
Over the years, Stevens held several important NWP leadership positions, including membership on the executive committee. She served as vice chairman of NWP’s New York branch, spearheaded the NWP Women for Congress campaign in 1924, and worked in states where female candidates were among contenders for office. She also served as Alva Belmont’s personal assistant.
Stevens was arrested for picketing at the White House in the summer of 1917 and served three days of her 60-day sentence at Occoquan Workhouse before receiving a pardon. She was arrested again in the NWP demonstration at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in March 1919. Stevens published the quintessential insider account of imprisonment of NWP activists, Jailed for Freedom, in 1920.
Stevens clashed with Alice Paul and led an unsuccessful attempt to challenge the leadership of Paul’s successor, Anita Pollitzer. She was part of an internal dispute over the NWP’s emphasis on the World Woman’s Party and international rights rather than domestic organizing. During these tensions, a dissenting faction of NWP members tried to take over party headquarters and elect their own slate of officers, but Pollitzer’s claim to leadership was supported by a ruling of a federal district judge. Stevens parted ways with the NWP in 1947 and turned instead to activity in the Lucy Stone League, another women’s rights organization. In the 1950s she was a supporter of McCarthyism and anti-communism. In her last years, Stevens supported the establishment of feminist studies as a legitimate field of academic inquiry in American universities.
October 2009
Abby Scott Baker (1871-1944)
Abby Scott Baker, of Washington, D.C., came from a multi-generational military family. She was one of Alice Paul’s earliest associates and helped Paul and Burns plan their first major event–the March 3, 1913, national suffrage parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. She served as treasurer of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in 1914 and quickly became one of the most effective lobbyists for both the CU and its successor, the National Woman’s Party (NWP).
Baker traveled the country as part of the CU’s “Suffrage Special” train tour of western states in April-May 1916. The envoys set off with fanfare from Union Station in Washington, D.C., and Baker was in charge of handling the press for the tour. The support that she helped raise from women in states that had already granted women’s suffrage culminated in a June 1916 meeting in Chicago to form what was at first called the Woman’s Party of Western Voters, or Woman’s Party, for short (later, the NWP). When the NWP was more formally organized in relation to the CU in March 1917, Baker was elected to the NWP executive committee and served as its press chairman (1917-18) and political chairman (1917; 1919-21).
Baker was among the first demonstrators to picket the White House; she was arrested in September 1917 and sentenced to 60 days in the Occoquan Workhouse. In February-March 1919, she served as publicity manager and speaker for the “Prison Special,” a three-week lecture tour by NWP activists who spoke to packed audiences about their jail experiences in an effort to generate support for the suffrage cause.
Baker was an important lobbyist during the key years (1917-20) that the NWP pressured for passage of what became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Known as the diplomat of the NWP, Baker was a significant presence in the organization’s ongoing tactic of asserting personal influence upon leading authorities in public and private life. When the NWP’s patriotism was challenged, she reminded critics that her three sons were fighting in World War I. In the midst of the ratification process for the 19th Amendment, Baker was among the NWP members who attended the Democratic National Convention of 1920 in San Francisco and successfully brokered a pro-suffrage plank as part of the party platform. She subsequently lobbied the presidential candidates from both political parties, James M. Cox and Warren G. Harding, to support the women’s rights cause.
After suffrage was achieved, Baker became a member of the NWP’s Committee on International Relations and the Women’s Consultative Committee of the League of Nations. She also represented the NWP at the League’s 1935 international conferences in Geneva where the issue of equal rights was discussed.
September 2009
Lucy Burns (1879-1966)
Born in Brooklyn, New York, to an Irish Catholic family, Burns was a brilliant student of language and linguistics. She studied at Vassar College and Yale University in the United States and at the University of Berlin in Germany (1906-8). While a student at Oxford College in Cambridge, England, Burns witnessed the militancy of the British suffrage movement.
Burns set her academic goals aside and in 1909 became an activist with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). She perfected the art of street speaking, was arrested repeatedly, and was imprisoned four times. From 1910 to 1912 she worked as a suffrage organizer in Scotland.
Burns met Alice Paul in a London police station after both were arrested during a suffrage demonstration outside Parliament. Their alliance was powerful and long-lasting. Returning to the United States (Paul in 1910, Burns in 1912), the two women worked first with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) as leaders of its Congressional Committee. In April 1913 they founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), which evolved into the NWP. Burns organized campaigns in the West (1914, 1916), served as NWP legislative chairman in Washington, D.C., and, beginning in April 1914, edited the organization’s weekly journal, The Suffragist.
Burns was a driving force behind the picketing of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration in Washington, D.C., beginning in January 1917. Six months later, she and Dora Lewis–targeting the attention of visiting Russian envoys–attracted controversy by prominently displaying a banner outside the White House declaring that America was not a free democracy as long as women were denied the vote. When Burns participated in a similar action with Katharine Morey later the same month, they were arrested for obstructing traffic. The banners displeased President Wilson and escalated the administration’s response to the picketing.
Burns was arrested and imprisoned six times. Declaring that suffragists were political prisoners, she was among those in the Occoquan Workhouse who instigated hunger strikes in October 1917 and were subsequently placed in solitary confinement. Jailed again when protesting the treatment of the imprisoned Alice Paul, Burns joined Paul and others in another round of Occoquan hunger strikes. Burns was in Occoquan for what became known as the “Night of Terror” on November 15, 1917, during which she was beaten and her arms were handcuffed above her head in her cell. Particularly brutal force-feeding soon followed. After her release, Burns commenced nationwide speaking tours. Unlike Paul, who remained active in the NWP until her death, Burns retired from public campaigns with the success of the 19th Amendment. She spent the rest of her life working with the Catholic Church.