Suffragists
Alison Turnbull Hopkins on the picket line, 1917-1919.
Women’s Suffrage.
No matter how far we still have to go when it comes to equality between men and women, it still sounds far-fetched that 99 years ago in the United States women did not have the right to vote.
Most historians say the women’s suffrage movenent began in 1848 when a bunch of thankfully-unruly and uppity women held a convention in Seneca Falls. Who would have thought the battle would have lasted 50 years?
Over the following decades, leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a legion of others organized demonstrations and gatherings throughout the country to educate people about why women were competent enough to handle a ballot.
Lucy Burns in prison, 1917.
In 1917 a series of demonstrations was launched in front of the White House, and that summer the police began arresting suffragists (see Lucy Burns above) and housing them in the infamous Occoquan Workhouse under horrendous conditions. When President Wilson pardoned the women, they at first refused to leave, claiming they had done nothing wrong that would require a pardon.
Doris Stevens, Alison Turnbull Hopkins, and Eunice Dana Brannon in their prison garb, 1919.
Eventually over 200 protesters were arrested, some of whom went on hunger strikes and were brutally force-fed. On November 14, 1917, during “The Night of Terror,” 40 Occoquan guards dragged, choked, beat, kicked, and hung women by their hands in their cells. Stories of these actions helped drive public outrage, and President Wilson finally declared his support for enfranchising women that year.
Inez Milholand at demonstration, 1913.
It took until August 18, 1920 for enough states ratify the 19th Amendment that the women’s right to vote became national law. Our photographs of suffragists come from the Library of Congress collections, and are a tiny sampling of the women who, over the decades, pushed relentlessly to win a right that, for us today, is hard to imagine required a fight in first place.