Lucy Burns Suffrage Leadership PDF

# Lucy Burns 16 July 28, 1879 - December 22, 1966 ## Mr. President, what will you do for women suffrage? Perched on a pool table in a London police station, Lucy Burns chatted away with Alice Paul, the only other American who had been arrested that day. The two women had been protesting with Br...

# Lucy Burns 16 July 28, 1879 - December 22, 1966 ## Mr. President, what will you do for women suffrage? Perched on a pool table in a London police station, Lucy Burns chatted away with Alice Paul, the only other American who had been arrested that day. The two women had been protesting with British suffragists outside of Parliament. The date was June 29, 1909. It was Lucy's first arrest - she had slapped a policeman and wrested his whistle away from him. At the police station, Alice introduced herself after noticing the American flag pin on Lucy's coat. The two elbowed their way through the crowd of a hundred women to the only place they could find to sit. From that day on, the names of these two women would be forever linked. Little is known about Lucy's childhood. She was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn to Irish-American parents. She was an avid learner - her studies took her to Vassar, Yale, Columbia, Oxford, and two universities in Germany. She seized opportunities that women before her had been denied. Lucy was at Oxford, but tiring of her endless studies, when she went to her first suffrage meeting. The speaker, Emmeline Pankhurst, was electrifying. She led British suffragists into militant activism, disrupting political meetings, setting fires on golf courses, and hurling rocks through windows. Lucy admired the British suffragists. "I was very much impressed by their moral ardor, optimism and buoyancy of spirit," she said. She dove headfirst into the fight. Lucy threw ink bottles and broke police station windows. She was arrested and sent to prison three times and went on hunger strikes twice. "We sleepy Americans don't know what a go-ahead country this is," she wrote to her friends. Lucy was a striking presence in suffrage circles, her flaming red hair piled dramatically on top of her head and her blue eyes blazing with passion. ## We went to jail and we are glad that we did it The image is a collage with a background of yellow and red. In the center of the image is a photo of a young woman looking to the side of the image. She is wearing a light colored blouse with dark fabric around the neck. Beside and slightly behind her is a photo of a woman behind bars, with a red hair band. There are two other images of closed fists drawn in the background. ## Deeds, not words "Deeds, not words" was the motto of the British suffragists Lucy so admired. By that phrase, they meant that lawmakers should stop talking and start taking action. American suffragists took another famous slogan - "Votes for Women!" - from their British sisters. And Alice started a committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, DC. Lucy was quickly arrested for chalking a suffrage message on a sidewalk. She paid the one dollar fine, but she was just getting started. Lucy organized a tour through the West to convince voters to defeat anti-suffrage candidates. At first, NAWSA welcomed Alice and Lucy. But soon, the pair became too radical for the staid organization, and they split off to form their own organization, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. The next year, on March 3, 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, DC, stealing President Woodrow Wilson's thunder on his inauguration weekend. Mobs of drunken men harassed the eight thousand women as they fought their way up Pennsylvania Avenue. Men jeered, spat at the women, tripped them, tore their clothing, beat them with the poles of their banners, and stubbed out cigars on their arms. Police stood idly by. Three hundred women were treated for injuries. Three years later, on December 5, 1916, Lucy and nine other women attended Wilson's annual address to Congress. They unfurled a banner from the visitors' gallery that read, "Mr. President, What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?" Men below hoisted a young boy on their shoulders, and he ripped the banner from their hands while security guards surrounded the women. Becoming impatient, the women began a series of pickets outside the White House in January 1917. Police were increasingly rough with the "Silent Sentinels" who stood outside in all weather holding suffrage banners aloft. Eventually, they started arresting and jailing them. Lucy was the first picketer to be arrested, and she spent more time in prison than any other suffragist. One day in April 1917, at the height of World War I, picketers unfurled banners calling the president "Kaiser Wilson," likening him to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom the United States was fighting. The patriotic crowd was outraged. They chased picketers back to the group's headquarters, where soldiers tried to throw Lucy over a second-story balcony. She dangled briefly over the railing while people below gasped. Someone in the crowd fired a shot through a second-story window, narrowly missing several women inside. On November 14, 1917, Lucy was again arrested. In what came to be known as the Night of Terror, the suffragists were taken to Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia. ## The Night of Terror Guards dragged the women to the cells and threw them like rag dolls on the floor and against iron benches and beds. They were denied food and water and left bruised and battered. In the ensuing prison stint, Lucy started a hunger strike, seeking to force officials to grant the suffragists the status of political prisoners, not criminals. After a week, she was brutally force fed, as she had been in England. "I was held down by five people.... I refused to open mouth. [Doctor] pushed tube up left nostril... it makes nose bleed freely," she wrote on a scrap of paper smuggled out of prison. Even prison terms and hunger strikes didn't deter Lucy. She organized watchfires in a park across from the White House, where protestors fed copies of Wilson's wartime speeches on democracy into the flames. Having been denied the full rights of citizenship, they found the president's words laughable. Brazenly, they even burned an effigy of the president. And they continued to go to prison - Lucy was jailed six times altogether. "She was a thousand times more valiant than I," Alice Paul said of her. Day after day, under Lucy's leadership, the women kept up their pressure. Yet when suffrage finally came in 1920, Lucy was physically and emotionally broken and ready to pass the baton to the next generation. "We have sacrificed everything we possessed for them.... Now let them fight for it," she said. She retired from public view, and after her sister died in childbirth, devoted herself to raising her niece. The rebel who had upped the ante in the suffrage battle took her fighting spirit home. November 14-15, 1917 - changed public opinion about the suffragists forever. That night, police hauled thirty-one picketers off to Occoquan Workhouse. They were beaten with fists and clubs as they went and were dragged down into dark, filthy, and airless cells. One woman blacked out when guards threw her against an iron bed. Another woman suffered a heart attack. Knowing Lucy to be the leader, guards shackled her hands over her head to the cell door, where she remained all night. When she refused to put on prison clothes the next day, they stripped her and gave her only a thin, dirty blanket to cover herself. Serving prison terms that were handed down after that night, the suffragists shivered with the cold. Rodents and cockroaches ran over them as they lay on bug-infested mats. Open toilets fouled the air. They were fed worm-ridden slop and worked in sweatshop conditions. Lucy started yet another hunger strike, along with more than two dozen other prisoners. She turned away when guards tried to tempt her with a chicken dinner. "They think there is nothing in our souls above fried chicken," she scoffed. When people learned of their treatment - and of the horrors of force feeding - public opinion turned in favor of the suffragists. LUCY BURNS > 77 <