Doris
Stevens
was born on 26th October, 1892. Brooklyn, New Jersey, on 28th July,
1879. A supporter of women's suffrage, Stevens joined with Alice
Paul, Lucy
Burns, Mabel Vernon, Olympia
Brown, Mary Ritter Beard, Belle
LaFollette, Helen Keller, Maria
Montessori, Dorothy Day and Crystal
Eastman to form the Congressional
Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS)
in 1913.
The
women
attempted to introduce the militant methods used by the Women's
Social and Political Union in Britain. This included organizing
huge demonstrations and the daily picketing of the White House. Over
the next couple of years the police arrested nearly 500 women for
loitering and 168 were jailed for "obstructing traffic".
By 1914 the CUWS had a membership of 4,500 and had raised more than
$50,000 for its campaign. The following year Stevens
was the organizer of the National Convention of Women Voters.
The Congressional
Union for Women Suffrage
became the National Woman's Party (NWP) in
1916. Stevens, who published Jailed
for Freedom in 1920, was member of the NWP's national council
between 1931 and 1936. She was also chairman of the Inter-American
Commission of Women (1924-48). Doris Stevens died on 22nd March 1963.
(1)
Doris
Stevens,
Jailed for Freedom (1920)
Finding that a suffrage committee in the House and a report in the
Senate had not silenced our banners, the administration cast about
for another plan by which to stop the picketing. This time they turned
desperately to longer terms of imprisonment. They were, indeed, hard
pressed when they could choose such a cruel and stupid course.
Our answer to this policy
was more women on the picket line on the outside, and a protest on
the inside of prison. We decided, in the face of extended imprisonment,
to demand to be treated as political prisoners. We felt that, as a
matter of principle, this was the dignified and self-respecting thing
to do, since we had offended politically, not criminally. We believed
further that a determined, organized effort to make clear to a wider
public the political nature of the offense would intensify the administration's
embarrassment and so accelerate their final surrender.
It fell to Lucy Burns,
vice-chairman of the organization, to be the leader of the new protest.
Miss Burns is in appearance
the very symbol of woman in revolt. Her abundant and glorious red
hair burns and is not consumed - a flaming torch. Her
body is strong and vital. It is said that Lucy Stone had the "voice"
of the pioneers. Lucy Burns without doubt possessed the "voice"
of the modern suffrage movement. Musical, appealing, persuading -
she could move the
most resistant person. Her talent as an orator
is of the kind that makes for instant intimacy
with her audience. Her emotional quality
is so powerful that her intellectual capacity,
which is quite as great, is not always
at once perceived.
She had no sooner begun
to organize her comrades for protest than the officials sensed a "plot"
and removed her at once to solitary confinement. But they were too
late. Taking the leader only hastened the rebellion. A forlorn piece
of paper was discovered on which was written their initial demand.
It was then passed from prisoner to prisoner through holes in the
wall surrounding leaden pipes, until a finished document had been
perfected and signed by all the prisoners.
(2)
Rebecca
West,
reviewed Jailed for Freedom by Doris
Stevens in Time
and Tide
on 24th March, 1922.
They (members
of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage) found that the police
while constantly
arresting them for minute technical offences, would not interfere
when they were assaulted by hooligans, and later on led Government-organised
crowds of uniformed soldiers and sailors against them. They went to
prison and, in an interesting penal institution called the Occoguan
workhouse, were fed on worm-crawling food and exposed in insanitary
conditions and when they denounced this state of affairs, not only
on their own account but (as has always been the gentlemanly suffragist
way), on behalf of the ordinary offenders, the administration called
to mind a penitentiary in a swamp, which had been declared unfit for
human habitation nine years before, and put them there. All this they
endured and thereby, without any doubt at all, acquired the vote.
With extraordinary naivety the United States Government failed to
cover up its tracks and left it patent that it gave women the franchise
not because of any consideration of justice, but because they were
a nuisance. There was no such magnificent exhibition of the art of
climbing down in the grand manner (with classical quotation from Mr.
Asquith) as our Parliamentary debate on the passing of the Act. A
crude, new country America; but no doubt it will learn.
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