Alice Paul and the Triumph of Militancy

The strong, feminist militancy of the National Woman's Party evolved as a logical response to the intransigence of male-centered government in the first decades of this century. Feminist militancy, by which I mean the readiness to resist governmental authorities and break the law for women's rights, developed gradually from men's (non)reaction to feminist political claims to equal citizenship. Woman militants were not shy about critiquing the male monopoly on power, and, in turn, male authorities responded to the perceived threat of these unnatural "iron-jawed" females. That female threat was even called "revolutionary." Militant suffragists were feminist revolutionaries, "striking the blow" themselves to secure drastic political change for women, and with that, change in women's social role, status and image.

In the early twentieth century it was beginning to be possible for angry women, potential militants, to do something about their lives. Time and time again, in autobiographies of women of this period, there comes across a strong sense of impatient resentment and desire for independence. Women wanted independence from the nineteenth century concept of a stiffly corseted, rigidly role-stereotyped woman, freedom from centuries of depending on men for identity, sustenance and all kinds of decision-making. In the twentieth century, cultural and economic change would slowly make a difference in the social role a woman could play. Virginia Woolf wrote that if a woman had the means to support herself, all sorts of possibilities arose; she might even be able to do something with her anger. The American feminist theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman echoed Woolf, arguing that the time had come for women to be completely independent, especially economically, of men. American women of the Progressive Era did have a rapidly growing presence in the labor force, in offices and factories, even in "male" professions, and those women's expectations were growing.

In the United States, the women who joined Alice Paul in a new militant suffrage movement were, as Paul put it, not of any particular class, but shared a "feeling of loyalty to our own sex and an enthusiasm to have every degradation that was put upon our sex removed." The Suffragist, the militants' weekly journal, was decidedly feminist in tone and subject matter. These new suffrage leaders saw revolutionary social implications in their struggle for political rights, and they were not the only ones to see them. A 1916 New York Times editorial called the "threat of sex vs. sex" carried out by the suffragists "political blackmail. . . an ugly portent, whose possibilities of damage are not limited to politics, but may extend to other parts of the social structure. These [women] leaders have justified to the extent of their powers the worst that has ever been said about the danger of giving votes to women." That same year a Georgia woman wrote western suffrage leader Anne Martin: "A female creature, queer and quaint, Who longs to be just what she ain't/ We cannot efface, -we can't forget her -We love her still -the stiller the better." Suffrage militants were not at all within the bounds of proper womanhood.

"Improper" woman suffragists revealed their impatience with passive roles in both England and the United States. There was a very direct relation between the arch-militant Women's Social and Political Union of England and the National Woman's Party of the United States. Women who were very important to the woman suffrage movement had long travelled the Atlantic to inspire and inform each other. Many of them advocated a new sort of independence for women featuring a determination to act--strike their own blows--to take matters into their own hands. The feminism of mid-19th century reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton was directly inspired by Englishwomen like Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright. Stanton and feminist reformer Susan B. Anthony's publication, "The Revolution," kept close track of the English scene. By 1887 the American/English Women's Franchise League included among its members the British Emmeline Pankhurst, along with Stanton and her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch (who had married an Englishman). Both the Pankhursts and the Stantons advocated a certain aggressive style of seeking reform. In 1901, Susan B. Anthony, while visiting London, according to both Emmeline and daughter Christabel Pankhurst, very much inspired Christabel Pankhurst's feminist goals. Realizing that Anthony would die without gaining the franchise for women, Pankurst thereby decided that "deeds, not words" should be the motto of her own organized fight, through the WSPU, for woman suffrage.

American graduate student Alice Paul was "extremely thrilled" when she joined the Parliamentary deputations of the WSPU while in England. Alice Paul, like her idol Susan B. Anthony before her, had a feminist philosophy that demanded full equality for women and a belief that moral principles should be committed to action. Paul was born in 1885 in the Quaker community of Moorestown, New Jersey, and was brought up with the Quaker maxim that women were equal before God and were entitled, even obliged, to address social problems. Paul had a serious-minded childhood, during which she developed a strong sense of right and wrong, and the belief that any life without a cause was empty. For Paul, although trained as a social worker, that cause would single-mindedly be women's rights. Although not without hesitation and much trepidation, Paul became involved in women's rights advocacy in England by heckling Foreign Secretary Edward Grey and Home Secretary Winston Churchill, and travelling with fellow American Lucy Burns and Emmeline Pankhurst herself, to organize and rabble-rouse in Scotland. It was while working with the WSPU in England that Paul and Burns first felt a "blazing" feminist anger, both at the rough treatment they received at the hands of male police and jailers, (such as forced feeding) and at the continued indifference of male political authorities.

Burns' and Paul's experience in England gave them a credibility and a notoriety of sorts when they returned to the United States in 1910, along with a lasting adulation for the Pankhursts and the WSPU, although they never did use the Pankhurst's "violent" tactics. After deputations to Parliament were repeatedly dispersed with violence, and after suffering harsh jail terms, the WSPU had decided to start destroying property, arguing it, and not human life, was the most important to the English government. The British authorities unleashed a tremendously hostile counterattack and in the process spurred a large portion of public opinion to the WSPU side. Only the Great War would put an end to the war between the WSPU and the British government. What Alice Paul learned from the British movement was a resentment of male domination, a desire for full equality, and a determination to organize women to aggressively act on their demands--to take their rights.

The fame they gained in England culminated in an invitation for Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to speak to the National American Woman's Suffrage Association in 1910 and then, in 1912, through the auspices of social reform paragon Jane Addams, a request to chair a "congressional committee" for NAWSA which would work for a federal woman suffrage amendment in Washington. The two young militants brought a new excitement--an aggressive spirit--to what was a lethargic woman suffrage movement in America.

The flamboyance of the militants' new committee was directed toward overcoming indifference to women's issues in their day; their concerted militant actions generated hostility and violence directed at them as "unnatural" women. How would a movement to revive the campaign for the middle class, progressive reform of woman suffrage come to be considered a dangerously militant, anti-government conspiracy? The coming of the war certainly helped shape events, but Woman's Party policy, was in direct reaction to government nonaction, going through gradual, increasingly militant stages, leading to the women's arrest and imprisonment. The Congressional Committee was defiant and aggressive from the beginning. That brand of impatient, militant feminism, coupled with jealousy over NAWSA-held suffrage territory and money, soon offended NAWSA's deliberately moderate leaders. The Congressional Committee evolved into the Congressional Union, a more independent, and stronger group. the CU difference--their strong feminism and militant-spirited strategies, obviously influenced by the British--became a liability and embarrassment to a NAWSA leadership determined not to erode the legislative and public support they had painstakingly won for suffrage. NAWSA officers were sure that the aggressive CU was doing damage by pushing too hard, alienating Wilson and antagonizing the public with their incessant, unladylike lobbying. The CU stood for a militancy, an aggressive, unapologetically egalitarian, feminist style, which NAWSA members could not countenance. Paul and Burns' group was expelled from NAWSA for being "too British" in 1914.

As an independent organization, the Congressional Union used increasingly militant methods between 1914 and 1917, trying to force the Wilson administration to secure the passage of woman suffrage. They began with "heckling" Wilson, and combined that with strenuous speaking and petitioning campaigns for suffrage. The small (with 5,000 members at peak in 1917) but dedicated new suffrage organization was particularly well-known for the British-inspired tactic of organizing women voters in the West to vote against recalcitrant Democrats in 1914 and again in 1916. In the 1916 elections, under a strict "party responsibility "policy, the Democrats were held responsible for nonaction on the newly formed western Women's Party's one and only plank, "the enfranchisement of the women of America through a Federal Amendment." Through the efforts of travelling organizers and helped by their own increasingly popular journal, the Suffragist, the militants did their best to convince women of the western states, many of whom had had the vote for years, to vote "Republican, Socialist, Prohibitionist or Progressive--anything but Democratic." Although studies have shown that the NWP did affect those elections with their appeals to western women to "help their sisters in the East," the Wilson administration was not impressed enough to pass the suffrage amendment. Wilson himself was gradually persuaded by a shift in public opinion, which was definitely helped by NWP pressure and propaganda, to favor woman suffrage, to be decided on by the states, although he personally remained "repelled" by women who, by speaking in public, "reversed the social order."

When the assertive policy of holding the party in power responsible did not secure woman suffrage, the Woman's Party began overt acts of militancy, acts in defiance of authority and the law, in 1917. It was decided in March of 1917, in order to further a united, politically powerful campaign, to merge the western campaign's Woman's Party with the Washington-based Congressional Union, and to call themselves the National Woman's Party. The militants' tactics to win suffrage continued to reflect their belief that women were worthy of political power both because of their shrewd use of women's existing political leverage and their obvious courage and iron-willed determination. Increasingly resentful of the men who held power over them, NWP suffragists used graduated militant actions against an unyielding government. At the same time, they sharpened their feminist critique. They slowly shifted from just insisting on a greater democracy which included women, to a condemnation of an oppressive, "autocratic," patriarchal society. In the context of this critique of male-run society, NWP demonstrators made a conscious effort to show the "women's" militancy of picketing and civil disobedience was different from and highly superior to, the manifestation of "men's" militancy--war. Paradoxically, the Woman's Party used the weapon of nonviolence very effectively to illustrate their enormous strength as women. Furious that the war-harried Wilson decided to receive no more NWP suffragist delegations, the militant women, in the first stage of their open militancy, began a perpetual delegation of White House pickets in January 1917, continuing almost daily pickets even after the United States entered the war in April.

The first stage of outright militancy was characterized by beautifully staged banner-holding, and self-consciously peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations against the Wilson government's inaction on suffrage. NWP suffragist action is a classic example of nonviolent resistance against a government, with the intent to defy and coerce authorities. A typical banner would mock the President by using his own lofty moral rhetoric. One good instance of this was the use of Wilson's war message: "We shall fight for the things which we have always held nearest our hearts -- for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government." The peaceful picketing method--which was perfectly legal--was adopted from several sources: it was copied from labor activists, as well as from the British militant suffragists. The tactic was also in part reflective of Alice Paul's adherence to a tradition of Quaker civil disobedience. To some NWP leaders, such demonstrations were particularly appropriate for women, "peace-loving by nature," to show that "woman's" militancy was brave and defiant, but peaceful, whereas "male" militancy, in 1917, was violent and destructive. Paul said it was clear that "women were the peace-loving half of the world and that by giving power to women we would diminish the possibilities of war." Whether they thought women naturally more peaceful or not, all NWP pickets demanded that Wilson act on woman suffrage immediately, and give women a voice in decisions on war.

The first mob attacks and arrests began the second stage of open militancy, in June. The government began to regard the women as more than a nuisance when the pickets sported new banners which were sharply critical of the Wilson government, proclaiming that America, fighting a war for freedom in Europe, was not as democratic as "free Russia," which had enfranchised its women. Summer and fall banners lambasted "Kaiser Wilson" and his "dictatorial and oppressive" policies toward women. The administration's violent reaction to such a lack of patriotism brought the Woman's Party to the third stage of open militancy, the October demands for political prisoner status in the face of what the women called "administration terrorism" against their members.

The abuse suffered by NWP demonstrators would fall on rich and poor, old and young suffragists alike. Co-leaders Alice Paul and Lucy Burns--both from very comfortable backgrounds, highly educated and progressive "new women" professionals (one an educator, the other a social worker/scholar) initially attracted other impatient feminists of similar backgrounds. The core membership of the NWP in the suffrage period, 1912-1920, tended to be of two types: the state and local officers, either mature (over 40) social reformer/clubwomen, inspired to greater militancy, or speaker/organizers, young college-educated "new women," with very liberal, modern ideas of women's equality and economic independence. There was, therefore, conflict in the NWP, over race and class issues, over how all-inclusive their "united sisterhood" should be. But to all NWP suffrage leaders and organizers, the defiant stance against the Wilson administration, as part of the battle against sexism, always came first.

Other groups of anti-government dissenters directed their protests directly against war itself, or against the capitalist system which made a war of "imperialist aggression" possible. Anti-government feminist demonstrators also wanted to change the system, but their vision was one in which women should be included, not just in government, but in full equality in all aspects of American society. Some NWP feminists stressed women's "superior" qualities, evolved over centuries of being "other-directed," but many others stressed that all women be given the opportunity to participate fully in their culture, whatever qualities they did or did not possess. NWP feminists shared a radical vision of completely equal opportunity, and were not willing to wait for their goal, in fact were more than willing to act, to fight against their opponent, the Wilson government.

The government started jailing militant suffragists in June, 1917, but the sentences were not more than a few days in length until mid-August and the "Kaiser" banners, when 60 day sentences at Occoquan workhouse in Virginia began to be meted out. By mid-September, sympathetic socialist women began to be more apparent among the arrested, including newspaper writer Peggy Baird Johns, one of the first to suggest demanding political prisoner status. The women at Occoquan, including Lucy Burns, readily assented to the plan, agreeing that they were not "traffic obstructors," as charged, but in reality, political offenders. The women drafted a letter to the district commissioners in Washington demanding political prisoner privileges and protesting their unjust and erratic sentences; they received everything from a suspended sentence to 60 days, for the same offense. The letter went unanswered, but the women continued to demand recognition as political offenders.

Government and prison authorities had little patience for the women's demands and showed their growing irritation in late October by giving Alice Paul a seven month sentence for picketing, and then placing her in a psychopathic ward, force feeding her after she decided to go on hunger strike. Paul and socialist Rose Winslow had been moved to the prison hospital because of illness and malnutrition from prison food. Paul and Winslow decided to go on hunger strike in order to get political prisoner status "in accordance with the plan started by the 60 day group." Paul had not wanted other NWP suffragists to hunger strike, but only herself. As she wrote national board member Dora Lewis, "Things took a more serious turn than I had planned, but it's happened rather well because we'll have ammunition against the Administration, and the more harsh and repressive they seem the better." The Administration's reaction to her hunger strike was to forcibly feed her in order to "save" her. Lewis protested to District Commissioner Gwynne Gardener, insisting that Paul and the other prisoners be given political offender status as "government enemies."

On November 10, 33 NWP women suffered Superintendent Raymond Whittaker's "night of terror" after being arrested for picketing the White House to protest the treatment of Alice Paul. The terror really began immediately, when two soldiers attacked the picketing Boston matron Agnes Morey, jabbing her broken, splintered banner pole between her eyes. Philadelphia grandmother Dora Lewis, always in the forefront, was knocked about by three youths. All the arrested suffrage militants regarded themselves as political prisoners of the Wilson administration, and were quite willing to undergo whatever necessary to have prison and government authorities recognize that status. After being taken to Occoquan Workhouse, the women's demands for political offender status were not even delivered to prison superintendent Whittaker before his men seized Lewis. The guards seemed in a frenzy of rage. After Louisiana officer Alice Cosu was clubbed into her cell, Whittaker told her "in her work she could stand anything." Cosu later wrote she "was completely unnerved . . . I was sick all night long from this treatment." When the other women suspected she had had a heart attack, their cries to Whittaker's guards for help were ignored. NWP vice president Burns, a vocal leader at Occoquan, was singled out for especially rough treatment. When she resisted being hauled away, she was beaten and then eventually had her wrists handcuffed high on her cell door. Young organizer Julia Emory stood in the same position as Burns in sympathy. Dorothy Day (the later Catholic activist) said she "naturally . . . tried to pull away" from the guards, so they responded by pinching her arms, twisting her wrists, then wrestling her down over an iron bench, bruising her back and shoulders. One man had his hand at her throat. By morning, Day was "in an hysterical and sick condition." No one treated Day's or anyone else's injuries; they were not even allowed to use a toilet. This was true although most of the women reported later they were at least bruised and shaken, and felt "terrorized."

Their night of terror ended, but the women did not relinquish their insistence on being considered Wilson's political prisoners. The only practical resistance seemed to be to use the hunger strike, just as the British had, to secure public sympathy and move the government to act on woman suffrage. But the hunger strike had its own horrors. It was met by the counterforce of "forcible feeding," ostensibly done to save lives, but the procedure was itself harsh and cruel. Feeding was done with tubing forced down the mouth or nostrils. Besides using forcible feeding, doctors and matrons tried to "persuade, bully and threaten" the women out of "sticking to their purpose," hunger striking to gain political offender status. But on November 23, Judge Edmund Waddill decided the suffragists had been illegally committed to Occoquan, and should be remanded to the District Jail; all were released on November 27-28.

The violence of the night of November 17, 1917, and the trauma of forcible feedings which NWP suffragists endured, were all done for a cause they took deadly seriously. The women insisted that the Wilson government was oppressing and discriminating against American women, while hypocritically fighting a war for democracy in Europe. The government considered their continued, defiant presence around the White House to be a threat to national security, and therefore did not stop mob abuse of the pickets and freely arrested demonstrators for "obstructing traffic." In March of 1918, the Federal Court of Appeals decided that the women arrested in 1917, some serving several months in jail, had been tried and imprisoned under no existing law. They had been caught up in a wave of war hysteria. They might arguably have been tried under the Sedition Act on expressing "scurrilous" opinions of the Administration, but that act was not passed until May of 1918. The militant suffragists were deprived of their civil liberties in the same way numerous others would be, from high school teachers and ministers with antiwar opinions to radical socialists. The suffragists had been arrested for obstructing traffic, a misdemeanor, but their lengthy sentences were far from appropriate punishment for such a crime. The sentences backfired as a deterrent however, since the jail experience thoroughly radicalized the suffragists in terms of their feminism and sense of solidarity with all women, as well as in terms of their disillusion with the government, leading to still further acts of militancy.

In the highest circles of government, NWP suffragists had made themselves very unpopular since their 1914 presidential "heckling." Between 1914 and 1917 President Wilson had become more and more respectful and attentive to the moderate NAWSA, as he became more convinced that NWP women were beyond the pale. In October of 1917 he had written NAWSA's Carrie Chapman Catt that he realized her group should not be associated with the militants, who had "laid themselves open to serious criticism." Wilson was convinced "the treatment of the woman picketeers has been grossly exaggerated" and there had been "an extraordinary amount of lying about the thing." He also wrote his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, on November 16, that the United States had no political prisoners, but the militant suffragists "offended against an ordinance of the District and are undergoing the punishment appropriate in the circumstances." He apparently thought the misdemeanor of disobeying a traffic regulation required a punishment of harsh treatment at the workhouse.

The Administration had tried to thwart the militants in other ways besides imprisonment. NWP militancy was directed at the public through the media; its effectiveness depended on public support, sympathy and outrage. Therefore, the Administration thought press control of their activities might be an effective curb. In July of 1917, Joseph Tumulty suggested a press blackout of NWP stories to the President. Wilson thought that "bare, colorless chronicles" might be better, but many papers, particularly the Washington Times, Star and Post, eventually adopted a policy of rarely covering NWP activities, or covering them in an unfavorable light. NWP organizers testified time and again that the press's lack of coverage became a problem. Also, after the June "Russian" banner appeared, a banner which contrasted Russia's franchise for women with "democratic" America's lack of one, the government's brand-new Secret Service kept tabs on the NWP all over the country. Western NWP leader Anne Martin was especially plagued by agents in October and November of 1917, several of them usually in attendance at her suffrage rallies; she even found one listening at her hotel door. One reason for such vigilance may have been Martin's proclivity for making statements like "Russia fears the world war is only a capitalistic war" because the United States' "democracy" jails its women. In Los Angeles, her government agent informed her she would hold no meeting, but she told him America had guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, and he could come arrest her if she said something "seditious." Martin wrote to NWP activist Pauline Clarke: "The hand of the administration is certainly reaching out after us. The prison story gets the women and they fear it." Martin argued strongly that criticizing Wilson's blocking of woman suffrage was not treason. Obviously, the Wilson government disagreed.

A week after the "terror," the New York Tribune accused the NWP of having incriminating links with radical socialists and "anarchists." From 1917 to 1919 the militants would be accused of "bolshevism," charges they would usually not even bother to answer. The Administration and the public considered their feminist views and their militant actions "radical," and many (leftist) political radicals agreed. The socialist Liberator reported in early 1918 that "Alice Paul and her young army of militants are one of the leading radical forces in American politics in the near future." Beginning in 1917, socialist women joined the NWP in droves to demonstrate against the Wilson government. "Laboring women," particularly Connecticut munitions workers protesting their lack of suffrage as workers and as women, also joined the fray. Obviously, many NWP members did not wholeheartedly embrace the anti-capitalist stance of the socialists, but at least for a time they were united in feeling left out of American society and united in their grievances against the Wilson government for suppressing their rights to free speech, and for sustaining a war in which they felt they had had no say.

The violence that NWP suffragists suffered at the hands of the Wilson administration, beyond showing that the government perceived the NWP as a threat to national security along with other dissenters, served to further radicalize and disillusion the largely middle class and relatively sheltered woman suffragists. The jail experience made them feel alienated from their own government. It strengthened their radical feminism and identification with other women, for some women, even including an identification with the poor and black women in prison. They all recoiled in disbelief from the way in which the government had had them punished. In essence, Woman's Party suffragists were angry at the hypocrisy of the Wilson government in fighting for democracy while denying women the right to vote, or even to free speech. When Alice Paul and Lucy Burns first founded their new suffrage organization, they staunchly believed, as good progressive reformers, in the promise of American democracy. They also expected a superior generosity of American men as compared to the unyielding British political system and brutish bobbies who had put down the Pankhurst rebellion. In 1917 the NWP saw the promise of American liberty as empty. Upon being released after the November terrors, Paul asked how "people fail to see our fight as part of the great American struggle for democracy? We are bearing on the American tradition, living up to the American spirit." Perhaps because they were middle class reformers, NWP suffragists reacted to their brutal treatment with incredulity and anger.

It would be difficult for women jailed by their society for exercising their rights of free speech to ever look upon that society in the same way again. Occoquan prisoners would feel desolate, alienated, and very bitter. Traveller's Aide worker Kathryn Lincoln said the days in jail were "an eternity." She would throw herself on her bed sobbing, feeling she was "gradually losing my hold upon life." Buffalo newspaper columnist Ada Davenport Kendall testified that Occoquan was "a place of chicanery, sinister horror, brutality and dread" from which "no one could come out without just resentment against any government which could maintain such an institution." These women reformers had come to a conclusion very like that of socialist and other radical dissidents, that there was no justice, no real democracy in America in 1917.

NWP suffragists blamed the government, and Wilson in particular, for their harsh treatment, for the suppression of their rights, and for their continued political powerlessness as women. As Boston NWP leader Agnes Morey wrote: "So far as democracy and liberalism goes it is for men -- that politicians speak -- women are outside their cosmos." Inasmuch as the government ignored their claims as women, the militants felt their grievance as feminists more pointedly. Perceived common oppression increased the "bonds of sisterhood." Many imprisoned suffragists saw life in prison as a microcosm, in extreme form, of women's situation in American society. They experienced utter powerlessness and violent attacks at the hands of male authorities. In prison, the women saw more clearly the particular injustice of women's vulnerable position vis-a-vis men, a view amplified by a new knowledge of the condition of their fellow women, especially black women, prisoners. As Estelle Freedman wrote in Their Sisters' Keepers, under the control of male jail keepers, woman prisoners represent "an extreme case of sexual powerlessness," symbolizing the constraints placed on all women by authoritarian institutions. Many of the guards at Occoquan seemed to carry out their duties with relish. Linda Gordon has argued that guards were "hostile and violent" to women imprisoned for working for birth control, because they seemed to "violate every male fantasy about what women should be like." Militant suffragists were regarded as unnatural members of their sex outside the prison, from the mobs in the streets to the President of the United States. They were also perceived as unwomanly within prison walls and treated accordingly.

For most Woman's Party activists, harsh treatment by prison guards did not dampen their feminist ardor, but only intensified it. As Texas recruit Lucille Shields put it: "In jail as one empty hour succeeds another, you realize more keenly the years that women have struggled to be free and the tasks that they have been forced to leave undone for lack of power to do them." Or note Massachusetts' Katharine Fisher's statement: "In prison or out, American women are not free. . . Disfranchisement is the prison of women's power and spirit." If disillusion and anger at injustice was one effect of jail, inspiration and renewed faith in their fellow women and in their cause, was another. Although as mentioned above, she had at first despaired in prison, Kathryn Lincoln testified upon release in late November 1917, that "[p]rison bars mean only freedom. . . . The cause of women must advance." Many of the released prisoners insisted the government had not daunted their spirit, and their continued militancy made that clear.

In spite of physical injury and illness, and of deeply felt disillusion and anger, most suffrage prisoners came out of jail renewed in purpose. As middle class progressive reformers, which most of them were, they had first believed in the process of American democracy, although they went well beyond the bounds of progressive reformism with their militancy. When the Wilson government cracked down on their pickets, unleashing mob and police attacks and leaving them to the vagaries of Occoquan Superintendent Raymond Whittaker and his guards, suffrage radicals' militancy and determination only increased. As established feminist radicals in 1918 and 1919, they would persist with demonstrations pointedly critical of the Wilson Administration and would continue to be jailed.

The National Woman's Party did not shrink from further acts of militancy when woman suffrage was still not won in 1918. In January, the President finally endorsed woman suffrage and the House passed the amendment. According to the NWP all this political progress was made as a direct result of Woman's Party actions. But by fall of that year, the Senate had not yet passed the amendment, necessitating further militancy. Pickets and arrests began again, and in early 1919, further demonstrations aimed to force the administration's hand. With the war over, Wilson was triumphant on the world stage but to frustrated militants, the battle was not yet won. Watchfires were kept burning in front of the White House, Wilson and his words were burned in effigy, and a "welcome party" of protesting NWP women met Wilson in Boston, using non-violent resistance against the Boston police. Additionally a group of Woman's Party luminaries toured on a "Prison Special" train, taking the cause to cities throughout the country. The men of the Senate remained unmoved.

What turned out to be the last militant protest provoked the harshest response of authorities and bystanders yet. It was held outside the New York Metropolitan Opera House in March of 1918. On March 3, Congress had adjourned without a Senate vote. When President Wilson stopped in New York to speak at the Opera House, Alice Paul planned to immediately burn a copy of anything he said about democracy in his address there. Bearing banners protesting Wilson's "autocracy" at home, the women marched toward the Opera house, but were soon met by police. The police, assisted by soldiers, rushed the pickets, and the ensuing battle went on for hours. Doris Stevens, a participant, said: "Not a word was spoken by a single officer of the 200 policemen in the attack to indicate the nature of our offense. Clubs were raised and lowered and the women beaten back with such cruelty as none of us had ever witnessed before. . . . Women were knocked down and trampled under foot, some of them almost unconscious, others bleeding from the hands and face; arms were bruised and twisted; pocket-books were snatched and wrist-watches stolen." Called a "bunch of cannibals and Bolsheviks" by the police, the militants were charged with "assaulting the police," but then released. Until victory was finally achieved, the NWP moved from one action to another, continually keeping the pressure on authorities.

Victory was finally in sight for the militant suffragists in 1919. In May, the House passed the amendment again, and in June, Wilson secured the last Senate vote for passage. After another long lobbying campaign, including picketing the Republican convention, the Susan B. Anthony Woman Suffrage Amendment was ratified by a sufficient number of states in August 1920. The Woman's Party took full credit for the victory, saying the Wilson administration had "yielded under the gunfire" of the NWP. The Woman's Party was certainly instrumental in moving the great "center" of the woman suffrage movement toward greater activity by its own radical actions. But the militants also insisted on the vital importance of a woman's right to participate in the political life of her society; they demanded attention for the this issue and got it. They revived the dead issue of a national amendment, revitalized the entire movement and made political authorities very aware of women's potential power. The militants' stubborn protests, however reviled they may have been, created a situation in which something had to be done. Each act of open militancy was followed by government action: feminist militancy worked.

The Woman's Party also made very clear when suffrage was won, however, that it was only the first step in "woman's emancipation." "The ballot is the symbol of a new status in human society, it is the greatest possible single step forward in the progress of women, but it does not in itself complete their freedom." For the NWP, then, the struggle did not end with gaining the vote. Additionally, the militants' importance goes well beyond the gaining of the suffrage. The NWP was a militant, feminist organization dedicated to women's rights and defiant in its struggle to gain power. Doris Stevens wrote that the militants' campaign compelled women to "stop being such good and willing slaves." In June of 1919, Alice Paul said that "Freedom has come not as a gift but as a triumph, and it is therefore a spiritual as well as a political freedom which women receive." Woman's Party suffragists carried out their campaign of political action through escalating stages of militant protest as women fighting for themselves, demanding and winning their rights.