Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
For
Anti-Trump Protesters: Lessons from the First White House Protests for Women’s
Suffrage, 100 Years Ago
January 9, 2017
Many
Americans will traveling to Washington, D.C., next week to protest against
Donald Trump on his Inauguration Day. Many will continue to demonstrate outside
the White House after he takes office.
Today’s
activists can learn valuable lessons from the first protest outside the White
House that took place 100 years ago, on Jan. 10, 1917. The activists were part of
the National Woman’s Party, a group that was fighting for women’s suffrage. It
took three more years before women won the right to vote, but the ongoing
protests at the White House played a crucial role in that victory.
The NWP
suffragists, who to Washington from all over the country, called their protest
“silent sentinels.” Woodrow Wilson, who had won his second term as president in
November 1916, was not an advocate of women’s suffrage. The NWP activists
carried purple, white, and gold banners with the words, “Mr. President what
will you do for woman suffrage?” and “Mr. President how long must women wait
for liberty?” When Wilson traveled to other cities, he was often greeted by NWP
members carrying banners with the same message.
The NWP was
persistent. Its members protested at the White House six days a week, every
week, until June 4, 1919, when Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment
giving women the right to vote. During this two-and-a-half year long campaign,
many of the activists were harassed and arrested, and mistreated while in
prison. But their persistence and civil disobedience paid off.
Alice Paul
was the leader of the NWP and the silent sentinels. After graduating from
Swarthmore, Paul earned a master’s degree in sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania. In 1907 she moved to England to practice social work among the
poor at a Quaker-run settlement house in Birmingham. One day she heard a speech
by Christabel Pankhurst, the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the
radical wing of England’s feminist movement. Paul was intrigued by the
Pankhursts’ motto, “Deeds not words,” which they translated into direct action,
including heckling, rock throwing and window smashing, to draw attention to the
cause of women’s rights. Not surprisingly, the women were often arrested for
such protests, which led to newspaper photos of activists being carried away in
handcuffs by the police.
Hesitant at
first to join their militant crusade, Paul eventually overcame her fears and
was arrested and jailed several times. In prison, she and other suffragettes
protested their confinement with hunger strikes. Their jailers force-fed them.
Paul took solace in a motto that one of her fellow activists carved into the
prison wall: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
When Paul
returned to the United States in 1910, she was determined to inject the radical
ideas she had learned in England into the women’s rights movement. While
earning her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Pennsylvania (her
dissertation examined women’s legal status), she joined the National American
Woman Suffrage Association. At the suggestion of reformer Jane Addams, founder
of Chicago’s Hull House and the settlement house movement, Paul was soon
appointed head of the committee responsible for working for a federal women’s
suffrage amendment.
In 1912 she
moved to Washington, D.C., and joined forces with Lucy Burns, another American,
whom she had met when they were both arrested in a London suffrage protest. The
duo began planning an elaborate parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s
presidential inauguration, scheduled for March 4, 1913. About 8,000 college,
professional, middle- and working-class women marched with banners and floats
down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. The crowd
watching the march was estimated at half a million people; many harassed the
marchers while the police stood by. Troops were called to restore order and to
help the suffragists get to their destination—six hours after the parade
started. The melee generated headlines, making the issue of women’s suffrage a
topic of conversation around the country.
Although
Wilson showed some interest in the women’s cause, he said the time was not yet
right. Paul never believed Wilson was the least bit sympathetic to women’s
suffrage. He would only support them, she thought, if public opinion compelled
him to.
In this and
other respects, Paul disagreed with NAWSA leaders. They endorsed Wilson,
despite his opposition to women’s suffrage, hoping they could eventually
convince him. They worried that Paul’s tactics could trigger a backlash. They
also disagreed with Paul’s emphasis on winning a federal amendment. NAWSA’s
main focus was on winning women the vote one state at a time, hoping to build
momentum that could later lead to a federal constitutional change. By 1912,
however, only nine states had granted women the vote.
In reality,
the two strategies complemented each other: even if the amendment was passed by
Congress, it would have to be ratified in the states, where NAWSA was building
its base.
But the
broader disagreements led to a split. Paul and her followers first formed the
Congressional Union in 1914, which became the NWP, which recruited women
prepared to engage in direct action. The NWP published a weekly paper and
staged demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, hunger strikes, and
lobbying vigils. Suffragists released from prison, wearing prison uniforms,
rode a “Prison Special” train, speaking throughout the country.
During the
29 months of the “silent sentinels” outside the White House, more than 1,000
women picketed, including Alice Paul, every day except Sunday.
President
Wilson initially patronized the protesters, tipping his hat to them when he
passed by. But when the United States entered World War I, the president and
others became irate over the idea of women picketing outside the White House
while the nation was at war. Between June and November 1917, police arrested
218 protesters on the trumped-up charge of “obstructing traffic.” Most of these
women were imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.
Usually,
the women were released after three days in prison. But they returned to the
White House to continue picketing. The battle between the police and the
protesters escalated. Inside the prison, the women faced harsh living
conditions, rancid food and the denial of medical care when they were ill. They
were denied visitors. Their jailers beat them and confined them to cold,
unsanitary cells. Some were placed in solitary confinement and subjected to
force-feeding.
On November
13, 1917, an angry crowd began attacking the White House picketers. Some stole
and tore the women’s banners. Rather than restrain the hostile mob, the police
arrested the peaceful protesters and sent them to jail in paddy wagons.
When they
arrived at the prison, they met some of their NWP comrades who were already in
jail. Alice Paul had been there since October 22, serving sentences totaling
seven months. Paul and her colleagues adopted the tactics she had learned in
England. They demanded to be treated as political prisoners. On November 5, she
began a hunger strike. She was force-fed three times a day.
On the
night of November 14, 33 NWP prisoners were brutally tortured and beaten by the
workhouse guards and the superintendent, W.H. Whittaker. Whittaker ordered the
nearly 40 guards to brutalize the suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained
her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night.
They threw Dora Lewis into a dark cell and smashed her head against an iron
bed, knocking her unconscious. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, who believed Lewis to
be dead, suffered a heart attack. The guards beat, choked, pinched, and kicked
the other women.
The press
reported on the suffragists’ terrible experiences in prison, and politicians
and activist groups demanded their release. On November 27 and 28, all the
protesters were released. The following March, the Washington, D.C. Circuit
Court of Appeals declared that 218 suffragists had been illegally arrested,
illegally convicted and illegally imprisoned. The women could have filed suits
for damages, false arrest and imprisonment, but they chose not to.
The public
outcry played a role in Wilson’s decision in 1917 to reverse his stance and
announce his support for a suffrage amendment. He explained it was a “war
measure”—to stop the controversy over women’s rights from dividing the country
during wartime.
But it was
not until the war was over, in 1919, that both the House and the Senate passed
the Nineteenth Amendment. Because the suffrage movement had invested heavily in
state-level campaigns, its leaders were confident they could garner the
three-fourths of the states needed to ratify the amendment.
By the
summer of 1920, they needed just one more state to vote in favor; the Tennessee
legislature met in August 1920 to vote on the issue. The deciding vote was cast
by Harry Burn, at 24 the youngest member of the Tennessee assembly. He
initially intended to vote no, but changed his vote after receiving a telegram
from his mother asking him to support women’s suffrage. Women had finally
gained the right to vote—72 years after the first women’s suffrage meeting took
place in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. The persistent and militant protests
at the White House 100 years ago were a turning point in the struggle for
women’s rights.
Peter
Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental
Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The
100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation
Books).
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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