For a country that prides itself on its democracy, the United States has forced a lot of its citizens to fight for the privilege of voting. August 18th marks the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” That milestone is sometimes described as having “given” women the right to vote. It wasn’t a gift; it was a hard-won victory on the part of suffragists who’d been agitating for it for more than seventy years, on the basis of their common humanity with men.
Even in the decade before the amendment was passed, its ratification was by no means a certainty. Though women had the vote in a handful of Western states, elsewhere in the country state after state turned down women’s suffrage. The antis, who fretted that women would be irredeemably sullied by the rough-and-tumble of politics (and would push issues such as temperance and wage equality), included women as well as men.
It took a surge of inventive, audacious, confrontational protests, inspired in part by militant British suffragists, to reënergize the movement. In January, 1917, the National Women’s Party, led by the single-minded young suffragist Alice Paul, began a campaign of civil disobedience. For the first time, protesters picketed the White House. Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat and patrician racist who had been reëlected President the previous year, had no interest in supporting a federal amendment granting women the vote, but tolerated the provocation for a while. After the United States entered the First World War, though, the suffragists started carrying signs comparing Wilson to the Kaiser, and his patience ran out. In June, the police began arresting the protesters en masse. Convicted of offenses such as “disorderly conduct” and “obstructing sidewalk traffic,” they were imprisoned, in harsh and filthy conditions, at the Occoquan Workhouse, in Lorton, Virginia.
When the women were denied recognition as political prisoners, they went on hunger strike, and guards subjected them to horrific force-feedings. The more moderate suffragists continued to lobby male politicians, for the most part politely and effectively. But when Congress finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment, and the states ratified it, that victory was largely due to the new breed of suffragist who simply would not stand down. “People who had never before thought of suffrage for women had to think about it,” a jailed picketer recalled, “if only to the extent of objecting to the way in which we asked for it.”