In celebration of the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in New York.
There are a number of phrases I’ve noticed are used when people talk about the 19th Amendment. They say that women got the right to vote, or were given the right to vote—they don’t talk about how women fought for their right to vote, how they were imprisoned and beaten for their efforts to gain suffrage. There is an odd sort of “glossing-over” that occurs when there are opportunities for the work of suffragettes to be recognized. It’s as though, in the process of women taking a step forward, they were pushed a step back, out of the light and back into the shadows of history.
As it is, the very word “suffragette” conjures up specific imagery. It’s the image of women standing demurely in large hats and long dresses, holding signs with slogans like, “Votes for Women.” This imagery largely ignores the rather colorful history of suffrage movements both in the United States and outside of it. In fact, if you simply go to the “Suffragette” page on Wikipedia, there’s an entire subsection titled “Arson, property damage, and domestic terrorism.” Clearly, the concept of the quiet, composed suffragette is not the whole story.
Enter Alice Paul and Lucy Burns—two terrifically well-educated American suffragettes. Before their involvement with the women’s suffrage movement, Burns attended Vassar College and Yale University, as well as the University of Berlin in Germany and Oxford in England. Paul, no less impressively educated, attended Swarthmore College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the New York School of Philanthropy—an institution that would later become known as Columbia University. Despite their work in the American women’s suffrage movement, the two actually met through their involvement in the distinctly more radical British women’s suffrage movement. Overseas, they learned how to use civil disobedience to pave the way for civil rights.
Alice Paul, 1919
When Paul and Burns returned to the states, the two began to work with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), a well-established organization aiming for a state-by-state approach to universal woman’s suffrage. Paul and Burns were convinced that, in order for real, concrete change to be made, the Constitution would need to be amended. In the states, they immediately set to adopting a tactic that has been characterized as “sustained dramatic, non-violent protests.” Under NAWSA, they organized a parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, capitalizing on the crowds already present in DC. Over five thousand suffragettes marched through the streets of the capital, watched by an even greater number of spectators. The onlookers, however, were not pleasant. A number of men in the crowd attacked the suffragettes, blocking the path of the parade, yelling insults at the women. The minimalistic police force provided by the city barely intervened. By the end of the parade, one hundred suffragists were taken to the hospital, and cavalry troops from Fort Myer had to be brought in to subdue the enraged crowd. Despite the chaos, the parade that Burns and Paul had organized was a brilliant political success: not only did it make more people aware of NAWSA, the subsequent violence they faced made the women look all the more sympathetic. It was the first step in pursuing Alice Paul’s philosophy of “hold[ing] the party in power responsible.”
The suffragist Inez Milholland, leading the Suffrage Parade organized by Paul and Burns
The parade, however, split Paul, Burns, and their followers irreparably from NAWSA. In 1914, Paul and Burns’ sub-organization, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, split from their parent organization. Two years later, they formed the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The NWP continued to put pressure on those in power. Their greatest pressure? The Silent Sentinels.
The Silent Sentinels were NWP protesters that stood outside the White House 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, until the 19th Amendment was passed. Their protest lasted two and a half years—an unrelenting black-eye to Wilson’s war-time presidency. The protesters twisted with words of Wilson’s own speeches in their signs, taking any opportunity to address the hypocrisy or indifference of their government. The Sentinels were not taken kindly to. Unprotected by police, they were harassed and attacked by citizens. Later, they were arrested under the contrived charge of obstructing traffic.
The imprisonment of the NWP suffragettes was arguably one of the darkest times in the suffrage movement. The arrested protesters were sent, by and large, to the Occoquan Workhouse—a brutal, rat-infested work facility where the women were frequently beaten on the orders of the prison superintendent. Even incarcerated, the work of Paul and Burns did not stop. Paul and Burns prompted the other suffragists to demand to be considered political prisoners. They organized outbursts of civil disobedience, encouraging the women to refuse to comply at any and every opportunity. Following their release, a number of women wrote about their experiences at the Occoquan Workhouse, recalling, in particular, the night of November 15, 1917—a night which gained the name “the Night of Terror.” On that day, the imprisoned suffragettes were beaten with the express intent of teaching them a lesson. One suffragette was knocked unconscious when her head was slammed against an iron bed. Another suffered a heart attack and wasn’t given treatment until the morning. Lucy Burns herself was beaten, handcuffed upright and forced to hang in her cell. Before this incident, Burns had instituted a nearly three-week hunger strike to protest the workhouse’s treatment of Paul, who was also carrying out a hunger strike. At the risk of having two dead women on their hands, both Paul and Burns were force-fed.
Lucy Burns in the Occoquan Workhouse
The suffragettes’ experiences at the workhouse caused exactly the public outrage that the NWP expected that it would. Doris Stevens, a jailed suffragette and prominent member of the NWP, managed to release information of the suffragette’s ordeals to the public, sparking outrage. The jailed suffragettes were viewed as martyrs for their cause, though the suffragettes considered it “martyrdom used for a practical purpose.” Between Paul and Burns, they held over 14 months worth of prison time, though it was Burns who served more time in jail than any other American suffragist.
The first time I heard about Paul and Burns, was stunned that I hadn’t heard about them before. Their willingness to put themselves physically at risk for the right to vote essentially guilted the nation into enfranchising women. They brought out the worst in the government, and then called the nation out to look.
Their plight—and the erasure of it—concerns me. Women like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns have changed the world and proven that women can do it, yet women are still underrepresented in positions where they would be most easily able to do it. Professions with the highest capacity to affect change are still male-dominated. According to the American Bar Association, only 36% of lawyers are women, with women constituting less than 25% of the counsel for Fortune 500 companies. In federal and state judgeships, women make up, on average, approximately 34% of the positions. I’m focusing mainly on law here, as lawyers have traditionally made up the main body of our representatives in the House and Senate—lawmaking bodies that are overwhelmingly male (80.7% and 79% male, respectively). With women making up 50.8% of the population of the United States, it is continually alarming to me that women are not only underrepresented in leadership but also that the moments in which they have been leaders have been diminished and erased. How can women find the inspiration and the encouragement to step forward if our role models are redacted?
How do we move forward, when we’re not allowed to have a past?