Silent Sentinels

From "A Mighty Girl" January 18, 2017 

For two and a half years, the "Silent Sentinels" picketed in front of the White House for women's suffrage. This group of determined suffragists was organized by the National Woman's Party, led by suffrage leaders Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. Their vigil began on January 10, 1917 and continued every day and night, except Sunday, until June 1919 when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed both the House and the Senate.

Many of the more than one thousand different women who participated in the vigil were arrested at various times, including 16 suffragists who were arrested on July 14, 1917 and sentenced to 60 days in jail at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia for “obstructing traffic." Although President Woodrow Wilson pardoned this group after three days, Alice Paul and others were famously arrested in October of that year. Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison. To protest the poor conditions of the women held at the Workhouse, Paul led a hunger strike which resulted in her being force-fed.

Press coverage of these abuses, along with on-going protests, strongly influenced the Wilson Administration who declared, in January 1918, that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure" and asked Congress to act. Together with Burns and others in the National Women’s Party, Paul’s dramatic efforts brought the attention of the world to the struggle for women’s rights in America, and led to the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. Its passage marked the victorious end of a 72-year long struggle to achieve equal voting rights for women which had begun at the first women's right conference organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The story of these courageous women is told in the award-winning book, "With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote," for readers 10 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/with-courage-and-cloth

For an excellent youth-friendly introduction to the fight for women's suffrage in the US, we highly recommend "Rightfully Ours: How Women Won The Vote" for ages 9 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/rightfully-ours

To learn more about Alice Paul and Lucy Burns' fascinating story and their important legacy in securing women's right to vote, the film "Iron Jawed Angels" is highly recommended for viewers 13 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/iron-jawed-angels

To introduce children and teens to more amazing women of the Suffrage Movement, check out the reading recommendations in our post, “How Women Won the Vote: Teaching Kids About the U.S. Suffrage Movement, ” at http://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11827

And, for more true stories of inspiring girls and women who worked to change the world for the better, visit our “Activist” section in Biographies at http://amgrl.co/1R6cGAu

Women's right to vote

 But it still needed to be ratified!

On this day in 1919, Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote. One could say that the American women's suffrage movement began in 1776, when Abigail Adams asked her husband John to "remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors" when approving the Constitution. The movement grew hand in hand with the abolitionist movement; many women were active in both causes, and Frederick Douglass often spoke at women's rights rallies. The proposed Fifteenth Amendment, granting voting rights to black men, caused a division in the suffrage movement's leaders: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to support it because it didn't grant the same rights to women; Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone argued that it would eventually lead to voting rights for all.

Some states began extending limited voting rights to women in the latter half of the 19th century, and in 1869 two organizations — the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association — began campaigning for constitutional amendments on the national and state levels, respectively. 

The United States Congress first introduced an amendment in 1878, and would continue to introduce it with every new Congress, but it took more than 40 years to gain the needed two-thirds majority to pass.

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her "Declaration of Sentiments," which wisely adopted the language of the Declaration of Independence in calling for voting rights for women:

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

She concludes, "Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation — in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

Writer's Almanac 2014