Remembering Women’s Suffrage Protestors

Tactics and Techniques of the National Womans Party Suffrage Campaign

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. Using a variety of tactics, 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 guaranteeing women nationwide the right to vote. In so doing, the NWP established a legacy defending the exercise of free speech, free assembly, and the right to dissent.

[Detail] NWP members picket outside the International Amphitheater in Chicago, where Woodrow Wilson delivers a speech. October 20, 1916.

The NWP effectively commanded the attention of politicians and the public through its aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, clever publicity stunts, and creative examples of civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation. Its tactics were versatile and imaginative, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources–including the British suffrage campaign, the American labor movement, and the temperance, antislavery, and early women's rights campaigns in the United States.

Traditional lobbying and petitioning were a mainstay of NWP members, but these activities were supplemented by other more public actions–including parades, pageants, street speaking, and demonstrations. The party eventually realized that it needed to escalate its pressure and adopt even more aggressive tactics. Most important among these was picketing the White House over many months, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many suffragists.

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 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 the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

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Tactics and Techniques of the National Womans Party Suffrage Campaign

And few notable excerpts from another more lengthy article.

Radical Protests Propelled the Suffrage Movement. Here’s How a New Museum Captures That History

The first of the “silent sentinel” protests occurred on January 10, 1917. Twelve women, fighting for their right to vote, stood peacefully before the White House with picket signs all day, and every day after that, even as the nation entered the Great War in April. Though other suffragists voiced concern that the protest criticizing President Woodrow Wilson could stain the entire movement as unpatriotic, that did not deter the most resolute picketers.

Though other suffragists voiced concern that the protest criticizing President Woodrow Wilson could stain the entire movement as unpatriotic, that did not deter the most resolute picketers.

June 22, days after the protesters’ presence embarrassed the President in front of Russian dignitaries, the D.C. police arrested suffragist Lucy Burns and her compatriots.

Burns and the other women were brought to a D.C. jail, then released immediately because local law enforcement could not figure out what to charge them with, or even what to do with the women. As historian and journalist Tina Cassidy explains in Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote, the D.C. authorities were in a difficult position. “One the one hand, the authorities were trying to stop the pickets,” she writes. “On the other, they knew if the women were charged and—worse—sent to prison, they would be instant martyrs.” Burns and the other women were brought to a D.C. jail, then released immediately because local law enforcement could not figure out what to charge them with, or even what to do with the women. As historian and journalist Tina Cassidy explains in Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote, the D.C. authorities were in a difficult position. “One the one hand, the authorities were trying to stop the pickets,” she writes. “On the other, they knew if the women were charged and—worse—sent to prison, they would be instant martyrs.” The police eventually decided the protesters had illegally obstructed traffic.

It soon became routine; suffragists would walk with banners to the White House, get arrested, stay in jail briefly when they refused to pay their small fines, then be released. Crowds, anticipating the daily spectacle, gathered to watch. As suffragist Doris Stevens recalled in her suffrage memoir Jailed for Freedom, “Some members of the crowd…hurled cheap and childish epithets at them. Small boys were allowed to capture souvenirs, shreds of the banners torn from non-resistant women, as trophies of the sport.”

Men rip up a suffrage banner on June 22, the same day the first of the pickets were arrested. Bettman via Getty Images

Throughout the late summer and fall, suffragists were arrested, held and released by the Metropolitan Police Department, which were befuddled on how to handle this headline-grabbing form of protest that was not a simple criminal matter but one of large political consequence. Stevens, describing one crowd’s reaction to an arrest, evocatively wrote in her propaganda memoirs, “But for the most part an intense silence fell upon the watchers, as they saw not only younger women, but whitehaired grandmothers hoisted before the public gaze into the crowded patrol, their heads erect, their eyes a little moist and their frail hands holding tightly to the banner until wrested from them by superior brute force.”

The civil disobedience and hunger strikes culminated on November 14, 1917—the “Night of Terror.” According to the accounts of suffragist Eunice Dana Brannan, the harrowing night began when the women asked to see Lorton prison superintendent W.H. Whittaker in an organized group to petition to be treated as political prisoners. Upon meeting his wards, Whittaker threw the first woman to speak to the ground. “Nothing that we know of German frightfulness short of murdering and maiming non-combatants could exceed the brutality that was used against us,” Brannan recounted in the New York Times, prevailing upon the ethnic nationalism of World War I-era America.

Prison authorities had tried to suppress public awareness of what was going on. From D.C., 

Some news outlets fell back on sexist tropes and mocked the suffragists’ claims; a Washington Post article described Burns as “worth her weight in wild cats,” Paul as someone who could “throw a shoe twenty fit and hit a window every time” and sympathized that the prison guards had to listen to the “infernal din of 22 suffragettes.” 

Radical Protests Propelled the Suffrage Movement. Here’s How a New Museum Captures That History. Smithsonian