Over the past few weeks, one thing has become clear: Women are angry, and they were willing to go to jail to protest Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court and the persistence of sexual inequality and rape culture in America.
What they were really incarcerated for were their political beliefs — specifically, their advocacy of women’s right to vote.
In their fight for voting rights, these women endured violence, criticism and incarceration. But their tenacity ultimately paid off with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Their work reminds us how to channel frustration and anger into political change.
By the time of Paul’s conviction, the battle for women’s voting rights had been raging for seven decades. Women had called for the right to vote since the mid-19th century, beginning with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a founding member of the women’s suffrage movement and close associate of Susan B. Anthony, the convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a manifesto that entreated women to demand equal rights under the Constitution. Voting was seen as a key right, lest women be forced to submit to laws to which they had not agreed.
Paul entered the women’s suffrage movement at a time when enthusiasm was waning in the wake of Anthony’s death in 1906. A “spirited” young woman, Paul put suffrage on the national stage by taking it “outside — to the streets of Washington in a visible, ongoing display of vigils, protests, arrests, and other civil disobedience,” as an article in the Swarthmore College Bulletin put it. She believed that rights would never be given to women — they would need to win them.
Paul, who was born in New Jersey, graduated from Swarthmore in 1905 and went on to co-found the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which would later become the National Woman’s Party, of which Paul became the chairman. Her charismatic personality drew college-educated young women to the movement. She was the movement’s star and sensed that a time of great change for women, and the country, was at hand.
In late October 1917, Paul led women to the White House to call out President Woodrow Wilson for fighting a war for democracy abroad while not allowing women to vote for representation at home. Paul and her fellow protesters knew that arrest was likely. Indeed, the first arrests of suffragists picketing the White House had happened the previous summer, typically resulting in fines and short incarcerations. But the protesters were undeterred. The D.C. police even warned that the woman would be arrested, but the women persisted.
Then came the violence. Men threw stones and bricks at the women, with police even aiding in their attacks. The president lost patience and responded via the criminal justice system, which delivered longer, harsher sentences for the suffragists.
Neither repeated arrest nor imprisonment would deter Paul from the cause of suffrage. If anything, prison made her more dedicated to her activism. (She continued to fight for women’s rights into her 90s, pushing for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.) After her Oct. 22 conviction, Paul was locked up in the D.C. jail, and her co-defendants were imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Va.
To protest abuse inflicted on the prisoners, the suffragists began a hunger strike. In response, some were force-fed milk and raw eggs through a feeding tube. Paul would later say in an interview, “It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.”
Paul and her fellow suffragists were released from prison the following month “without condition or explanation.” In the spring of 1918, their convictions were overturned on the grounds that the women’s arrests, convictions and imprisonments were illegal.
The journey of Paul and other suffragists reminds us of the importance of making women’s voices heard and the various ways that women faced belittlement, arrest, mob attack, incarceration, prison abuse, force-feeding and separation from their families, children and jobs to win the right to vote.
So, angry about the Kavanaugh hearings? While being willing to get arrested in the fight for one’s beliefs may show a certain tenacity, there is no better way to honor that willingness than exercising a right won through arrest and imprisonment: the right to vote.
