Posted on August 28, 2019
This month - just ten days before today - we celebrated the anniversary of U.S. women winning the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920.
Today's anniversary occurred roughly three years before that.
On this date in 1917, ten women were arrested for picketing the White House.
There was nothing unusual, back then, with women picketing the White House. Women couldn't vote in the United States - and that meant that they had to follow laws that they had no say in, and they had to pay taxes without having electoral representation. Even though the nation got its start with the motto "No taxation without representation"!
Women had tried to gain the right to vote with organizing, conventions, petitions, and testimony to Congress, for years, and they still had no vote. How do you put pressure on elected officials if you don't help elect those officials?
(Obviously, women couldn't run for office then, either.)
Ever since January 10, 1917, women had picketed the White House - I gather every single day. (Of course, different women went on different days. Over the course of a year, more than 1,000 women participated.)
For months, the protesters stood silently, and President Woodrow Wilson waved at them or tipped his hat respectfully as he passed.
When the U.S. entered World War I, everyone's nerves were more frayed. The nation was entering a war that women had no voice in, and government officials and soldiers were more anxious about the war effort and had less patience for everything else. So...
In June the police began to arrest protesters. Alice Paul had already been arrested for her activism, in Britain, and she sometimes went on a hunger strike in prison. Whenever she wouldn't eat, she was force-fed liquid food through her nose - a really unpleasant experience.
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| Alice Paul |
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| Above, a woman's suffrage activist being treated like a criminal. Below, activists used the bad situation as a way to gain more publicity and to cultivate outrage over their treatment. |
The longer and longer prison sentences just for protesting made many people more sympathetic to the activists' message. And when they found out about the force-feedings, even more people cared.
Eventually the publicity surrounding the pickets, the arrests, and the force feedings forced President Wilson to change his course and support women's suffrage - and the 19th Amendment was approved by Congress not long after that.
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