Five prison guards held down Lucy Burns as a doctor shoved a tube up her nose to force feed her three times per day. The 38-year-old had launched a hunger strike one week earlier after being beaten and tortured for seeking the vote for women in 1917.
“I refused to open my mouth,” Burns wrote of her experience on tiny scraps of paper which were smuggled out of the jail, according to Burns’ fellow prisoner, Doris Stevens in her book, Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote. Stevens was sentenced for 60 days for picketing at the White House. The doctor “pushed tube up left nostril,” Burns said. “It hurts nose and throat very much and makes nose bleed freely. Operation leaves one very sick. Food dumped directly into stomach feels like a ball of lead.”
Alice Paul—Born in New Jersey in 1890, Paul held a degree from Swarthmore College and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1907, her social work studies took her to England, where she joined the British suffrage movement led by the Pankhurst family.
Burns and 32 other women, whose ages ranged from 19 (Matilda Young) to 73 (Mary Nolan), were imprisoned at the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia, on charges of unlawful assembly and obstructing the sidewalk after peacefully protesting in front of the White House on November 10, 1917. Some were sentenced for six days while others, like Burns, received six months, wrote Stevens. Their 13 days in the prison eventually drew national media attention for the prison administration’s brutality and its extensive efforts to keep their stay and treatment secret from the public.
“The women who were imprisoned were so committed to the idea that all women get the vote that they were willing to give their lives for it,” says Laura McKie, director of the recently opened Lucy Burns Museum in Occoquan Workhouse. “It was a pretty awful experience.”
The Night of Terror, which really should have been called Thirteen Days of Terror, began after prison superintendent William H. Whitaker became enraged with the women for refusing to agree to stop picketing the White House once released, for protesting their treatment and prison conditions, and for seeking to be declared political prisoners. Political prisoners had less supervision, greater freedom of dress and movement, didn’t have to do prison work like sewing and laundry, and could receive visitors, says Alice Reagan, an associate professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College and a key player in developing the new museum.
Guards launched the Night of Terror on one of the women the suffragists considered the most frail, Dorothy Day, who spent the rest of her life dedicated to helping the poor. She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a collection of autonomous communities dedicated to living “in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ.”
Lucy Burns—Burns, a graduate of Vassar College from Brooklyn, also studied at Yale, Columbia and universities in Bonn and Berlin, Germany. She became a suffragist while studying at Oxford University. Burns’ activist energy complemented Paul’s studied, thoughtful manner.
“They twisted my arms above my head, lifted me, and slammed my back twice over a bench,” said Day, who was 20 at the time and who is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church for her work. One of the men told her, “I will put you through hell.”
The guards then turned their rage on suffragists Dora Lewis, Nolan, and Alice Cosu.
“A man sprang at me and caught me by the shoulder,” said 73-year-old Nolan. “I remember saying, ‘I’ll come with you; don’t drag me; I have a lame foot.’ But, I was jerked down the steps and away into the dark. There was no light but from the corridor. Then they threw in two mats and two dirty blankets. (Mrs. Cosu and I) had only lain there a few minutes trying to get our breath, when Mrs. Lewis was literally thrown in.”
Nolan said guards grabbed Lewis “like a sack of flour,” smashing her head into an iron bed frame and knocking her unconscious for the evening, according to Cindy L. Bennett, author of the book Wicked Fairfax County.
Cosu, believing Lewis, 55, was dead, suffered a heart attack.
“Mrs. Cosu became desperately ill with chest pains and vomiting,” said Nolan. “We called for help, but guards nearby ignored us.”
Burns, an Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, became concerned after hearing the racket from the other cells. She launched a verbal roll call to check on the status of the other women, infuriating the guards who threatened to put a horse’s bit in her mouth to silence her. They stripped Burns down to her petticoat, shackled her to her prison cell door with her arms over her head, and forced her to stand in that position all night in her unheated cell.
Another suffragist, Emily Du Bois Butterworth, said she was taken to the section of the prison where males were held. “They told me I was alone and the men could do what they pleased with me.”
“It (The Night of Terror) helped turn public opinion to being more sympathetic to what the women were asking for,” Reagan says. “People began to ask, ‘what are you doing in the Occoquan Workhouse?’”
The guards would taunt the women with fried chicken and other tasty foods to try to get the women to resume eating. They would tell each of the women that the other women had stopped their hunger strikes. The women began to starve themselves in protest and the jailers feared being responsible for their deaths, so they force fed hunger strikers through a tube via the nostril or throat.
“Dr. Gannon then forced the tube through my lips down my throat; I gasping and suffocating with the agony of it,” Lewis later wrote of being force fed. “I didn’t know where to breathe from and everything turned black when the fluid began pouring in. I was moaning…Finally the tube was withdrawn. I lay motionless.”
Yet, none of the women gave in.
Initially, family and friends had no idea where the women had been imprisoned; they expected to find them at the D.C. Jail since they were arrested in Washington, D.C., at the White House. Instead, the women were transported by train to Lorton, Virginia, 30 minutes south of Washington. Once family and friends knew their location, the prison’s superintendent prohibited any visits, including from their lawyers. The women bribed guards to smuggle information about their stay to the public, but Whitaker asked U.S. Marines to surround the prison so no more information could be leaked.
An attorney, Dudley Field Malone, desperately tried to expose the maltreatment of the women and get them released. He eventually secured their release by challenging the government’s decision to imprison them in Virginia instead of D.C. where they were charged for violating the law. Prison superintendent Whitaker tried to circumvent the court order to bring the women to an Alexandria court for a hearing. He cut the phone line to the prison and disappeared for several days so he couldn’t be served with the court order.
“On November 23, the 26 suffragists who were still serving time were brought into the Alexandria courtroom,” wrote Bennett in Wicked Fairfax County. “The women appeared dazed, ashen and weak. Some did not have the strength to sit and ended up lying down on the court benches.”
The judge ordered the women be transferred to the D.C. Jail to complete their sentences. The women resumed their hunger strikes and President Woodrow Wilson, fearing they would die, intervened and had them released on November 27–28.
Wilson believed individual states, not the federal government, should decide if women should be allowed to vote and he was initially amused when the women wearing purple, cream, and gold banners began protesting in January 1917 six days per week in front of the White House. On occasion, he would invite them in for tea. The protestors became known as the Silent Sentinels because they initially protested in silence. They were frustrated that it was taking so long to convince each state to give women the vote and they wanted a constitutional amendment to make it possible for women to vote across the country. Women could vote in Russia, Finland, and other Scandinavian countries.
The suffragists decided it was time to hold parades and protests; tactics not used before by women in the United States, but had been employed by British women, known as suffragettes there, to gain media attention. Burns and suffragist Alice Paul met in a jail in Britain after participating in the British movement while studying at universities there. They learned many of the techniques used and sought to employ them back home in the United States. Some U.S. women, however, felt squeamish about protests and parades because they were seen as militant and unwomanly. Every day, the protests had a different theme—they had college day where college-educated women would protest and they had State Day where women from different states, including Maryland, would protest in front of the White House.
The women faced hostility and angry crowds at times. The public felt they should focus their energies on being homemakers and supporting the war effort and soldiers in World War I. The suffragists refused to wait until the war ended. They recalled suffragists stopped pursuing the vote for women during the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) because they were promised that if they helped with the war effort, their ideas on women voting would be entertained. Yet, 50 years later, women were still trying to have that discussion.
“A lot of people thought they were unpatriotic to continue picketing during the war,” McKie says. “These women were educated, worldly, had traveled, and had experiences and opportunities that hadn’t been possible a generation before. They were angry when World War I started and that they didn’t have a say.”
Wilson, the police, and, to some extent, the public saw the protests as embarrassing. Wilson ordered federal law enforcement officers to trail the participants and had the protestors arrested. When the protests continued, authorities became more aggressive, charging them fines, which if they paid meant they also were pleading guilty. Most of the arrested women chose instead to spend a night in jail.
“The women were middle- and upper-class ladies who you’d expect to be taking tea instead of picketing the White House,” McKie explains. “But, women at the time basically had no rights. When they worked, their wages could be taken by their husbands or fathers. When there was a divorce, the kids were given to the fathers. They couldn’t own property. When they married, whatever the family gave them became property of their husband’s.”
Voting at the time was largely conducted in bars, no place for a woman. Women sought more family friendly policies, including laws to strengthen consumer safety and improve education and economic opportunity. People worked six days per week at the time and women had no say on how their family’s earnings were spent nor could they get loans or go to college.
“Women saw that getting the right to vote was a way to get politicians to support family-friendly policies,” Reagan says. “They said, ‘I want to vote to make a better life for my family.’”
“The (suffragists) highlighted the government’s hypocrisy of supporting democracy abroad while denying its women citizens at home the right to vote,” according to a Library of Congress brochure titled Shall Not be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote.
The arrests of the suffragists grew more frequent. By the time the 33 women were arrested in November, right before the Night of Terror, authorities, citing frustration and anger with the women and multiple arrests, upped the stakes to try to coerce the women to stop protesting. They shipped the women to Lorton.
Author Kate Clarke Lemay wrote in her book Votes for Women, “Daily life in Occoquan (Workhouse) was meant to be miserable. The women wore coarse fabric dresses, labored in the heat of the gardens with their blistered hands, spent hours in the sewing room.”
A guard who claimed she was fired for being friendly with the imprisoned suffragists, alleged in an August 30, 1917, article in the Alexandria Gazette titled “A Woman’s Charges” that the workhouse food was wormy; bedding was seldom changed, going unwashed even if a new prisoner was assigned the bed of a released prisoner; prisoners were all required to use the same bar of soap; the suffragists’ mail was not delivered to them; and that the superintendent and his son beat prisoners.
“You get the sense (Whitaker) wasn’t a big fan of women from what we’ve read about him” Reagan says. “He had already been investigated for violence on the prisoners before the women arrived.”
By 1918, Wilson, who had two daughters who supported suffrage, changed his opinion in support of a federal amendment to grant women the vote “and he had to do a lot of arm twisting” to get it passed in the House of Representatives, asserts Reagan. The U.S. Senate refused, but an election shortly after changed the composition of the Senate and the amendment was passed. Suffragists struggled through numerous challenges for the next two years trying to get ratification from a three-fourths majority of states. Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, giving women the right to vote on August 26, 1920. Three months later, women across the country voted for president for the first time.
“It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the right to full equality won,” wrote suffragist Alice Paul of the events. Paul and Burns formed the National Woman’s Party to push for a Constitutional amendment to give women the vote. “It has just begun.”
Reagan said she gets frustrated when she hears voters, particularly women, take the vote for granted. She quotes one of her favorite posters which says, “She was not force-fed eggs and milk so you could not vote.”
“I say to all of my students, ‘If you didn’t vote, I don’t want to hear your complaints,” Reagan says.
U.S. women battled for the right to vote for more than 70 years before the 33 women were imprisoned. The women’s fourth night in the prison, November 14, 1917, known as the Night of Terror, however, changed the trajectory of the movement to secure voting rights for women nationally. Though the suffragist movement still overcame many challenges and difficulties after the women’s imprisonment, the Night of Terror seemed to fast track the effort. Three years later, women were allowed to vote with passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The protestors, known as suffragists, though, were so traumatized from being beaten, choked, dragged, clubbed with batons, and force-fed by the guards during their imprisonment that some of them never participated in suffrage efforts again. Burns left the movement after passage of the amendment and focused her life on raising a niece.
“These women were the strongest women,” McKie says. “They willingly went to jail, purposefully resisted their treatment, decided to do hunger strikes, and would have probably been dead if not force fed. We need to honor that commitment. We need to get out and vote. The museum doesn’t tell people how to vote; just that it is our responsibility to vote.”
The Lucy Burns Museum, located in Building Two, highlights the sacrifices and hardships suffragists endured so all women could vote in the United States. McKie, who volunteers as director of the museum after retiring from the Smithsonian Institution, says museum visitors see the suffragist exhibit, a prison cell depicting the forced feeding of the women, and a section on the history of the prison and reformatory in Lorton. McKie says she plans to open four additional prison cells in the future, hopes to launch an oral history project, and produce signature films for their theater once they secure additional funding. She also proudly noted the Girl Scouts offers an opportunity to earn a patch by visiting the museum.
“Lucy Burns has the distinction of being jailed more often than anyone in the National Woman’s Party,” says Page Harrington, author of an upcoming book called Interpreting the Legacy of Suffrage at Museums and Historic Sites.
Reagan says it is important to have a museum dedicated to the suffrage movement.
“It is very satisfying to see this museum come to fruition,” says Reagan, a docent at the Lucy Burns Museum. “So many museums just have a panel on women’s contributions. Women’s history is not really highlighted. There are only a few museums out there that have to do with women. People walk into this museum and they’ll often say, ‘we didn’t know this happened.’”
The grounds of Occoquan Workhouse and buildings were converted into art galleries, apartments, a golf course, two parks, and a museum after being sold to Fairfax County in 2002.
