In January 1917, members of the National Woman's Party (NWP) became the first people to picket the White House. Protesting the government's failure to pass a constitutional amendment enfranchising women, NWP members, led by Alice Paul, began picketing the White House.
Picketing the White House was so unheard of in 1917 that no one knew quite how to react. Woodrow Wilson tipped his hat to the women when he passed. However, as the United States entered the First World War, the growing nationalism of wartime made such protests seem “unwomanly,” “unpatriotic,” “dangerous,” “undesirable,” and even “treasonable.” The first arrests of suffrage pickets began on June 22, 1917.
In all, more than 200 National Woman’s Party pickets were arrested during the 1917 fight for suffrage. They were incarcerated at either the District Jail in the nation’s capital or the Occoquan Workhouse in neighboring Virginia.
Prison life for the suffragists was hard. Women at were issued uncomfortable clothing. Blankets were washed once a year. Prisoners might be put on punishment rations of bread and water and denied the right to clean clothes.
Guards threatened to use their whipping post, mouth gags, and straitjackets. The women were prohibited from talking at meals, which featured worm infested grains and soups. Prisoners were refused regular access to toothbrushes, combs, soap, and toilet paper. They were denied writing supplies and reading materials.
Suffrage prisoners toiled alongside other workhouse inmates at sewing, cleaning, and other tasks. When they could, suffragists taught one another foreign languages, offered other “classes,” and sang songs.
By the fall of 1917 women at both facilities began calling themselves political prisoners. They insisted that politics, not criminal behavior, had landed them in jail. They protested their lack of access to legal counsel and complained about their living conditions.
Soon the prisoners, including Alice Paul, began hunger strikes in protest of their living conditions. The dangerous situation inside the detention facilities escalated, peaking in November in with what became known as the “Night of Terror.” On November 15, 1917,women were beaten, pushed, and bodily carried and thrown into their cells when they refused to cooperate and attempted to negotiate with the prison’s superintendent. Dora Lewis was knocked unconscious and Lucy Burns handcuffed with her arms above her head. Soon there was the added terror of force-feeding.
Elizabeth McShane, a former school principal, described the force feeding process. A doctor poured a pint of cold milk mixed with two raw eggs into a tube inserted down the throat.
“Of course a stomach that has been unaccustomed to food for a week cannot take so much liquid cold, all in half a minute,” explained McShane. The mixture went down so quickly that before the doctor “was half through, it began to come up, out of the corners of my mouth and down my neck until my hair was stiff with it. [I] tried to…check the flow for a second, but it poured on until all was finished. When he pulled the tube out, it was followed by a large part of the food. Thereupon the matron and he walked away, leaving me in that messy condition.”
The campaign of civil disobedience and the public outcry over the prisoners’ treatment led to the release of Alice Paul and other suffrage prisoners at the end of November 1917. The National Woman’s Party 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 given to suffragists Britain, was affixed as a badge of honor on the formerly imprisoned women attending the meeting.
The NWP used the experience of imprisoned pickets to help spread the call for a federal suffrage amendment. 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 were veteran NWP organizers Vida Milholland, Abby Scott Baker, Lucy Branham, Lucy Burns, Mabel Vernon and Mary Nolan. The “Prison Special” tour helped to 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.
The nineteenth amendment to the Constitution enfranchising women became part of the Constitution on August 26, 1920.
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