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Martyrdom Used For a Practical Purpose

The Narrative Construction of Militant U.S. Suffragists as Martyrs

By Laurel Rogers| Originally published in the Vol. 6 no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2013) issue.

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In the preface to her 1920 memoir Jailed for Freedom, Doris Stevens describes the militant American suffrage campaign of 1913–1919 as both “a tragic and harrowing tale of martyrdom” and “a ruthless enterprise of compelling a hostile administration to subject women to martyrdom in order to hasten its surrender.”[1] In claiming that this martyrdom was “used for a practical purpose,”[2] Stevens clearly shows that the martyr figure was used by the suffragists as a political strategy. Though the attempt to present the many suffragists incarcerated and driven to hunger strikes in the year 1917 faced challenges as martyrs, the suffrage movement was able to employ methods that helped redefine the meaning of a modern martyr in a way that benefited the suffrage cause.

Ultimately, the publication and dissemination of the narratives of suffering produced by the suffragists relegitimized the suffrage movement’s justifiability and reinforced the position of the antagonistic Wilson administration as their adversary, thus solidifying and reenergizing their cause.

The suffrage movement had numerous definitional challenges. In their historical study of martyrdom, The Martyr’s Conviction: A Sociological Analysis, scholars Eugene Weiner and Anita Weiner define a martyr as “a member of a suppressed group who, when given the opportunity to renounce aspects of his or her group’s code, willingly submits to suffering and death rather than forsake a conviction.” According to this definition, and to the common understanding of a martyr as someone who dies for his or her beliefs, none of the American suffragists jailed for petitioning the White House can truly be considered a martyr because none of them died in the process.

Other scholars outright deny the possibility of modern-day martyrs. In his book Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World, historian Lacey Baldwin Smith claims that there have, for a number of reasons, been no true Western martyrs since the mid-nineteenth century. First of all, he says, “the Western European liberal state  ... did not feel overly threatened by their [martyrs’] presence,” considering them “‘heroes of conscience’ and misguided idealists motivated by the purest of impulses.”[3] In other words, did not provoke an extremely antagonistic response from the ruling power, without which the script of Weiner and Weiner’s martyrological confrontation cannot be followed. Furthermore, Smith says that martyrdom in the twentieth century “lost much of its effectiveness when overtly associated with political treason and violent social revolution, and it lost most of its meaning when secularized and stripped of its religious component.”[4] In “a world that has learned that retributive justice is best handled behind barbed wire and stone walls, not in public trials and executions, and that the mental hygiene clinic serves as a far more effective weapon against political and ideological deviancy,” Smith contends that the martyr no longer exists.[5] To present themselves as martyrs, Smith’s challenges had to be negotiated by the suffragists in order to reimbue the figure of the female martyr with potency, especially since none of the militant suffragists fulfilled Weiner and Weiner’s martyrological criteria of death. However, they did suffer greatly and the suffrage movement was able to utilize their suffering to construct these women as martyrs through the dissemination of reports about their situation to the American public.

Prior to the National Woman’s Party’s hunger strikers, the suffrage movement was not without martyrs. Inez Milholland Boissevain, a charismatic and attractive labour lawyer and activist, was “the public face of the suffrage movement” until she collapsed on October 22nd, 1916 while giving a speech as part of a tour. When she died from pernicious anemia a month later at the age of thirty, she was “instantly declared a martyr of the suffrage movement,”[6] though her death too does not perfectly fit Weiner and Weiner’s model, as her death was not caused by an antagonistic party. Memorials held in her honour on Christmas Day recast her death, not just as the lamentable passing of a prominent member of the suffrage movement, but also as a “sacrifice, made so generously for liberty.”[7] At these memorial meetings, women “not only paid radiant tribute to Inez Milholland, but reconsecrated themselves to the struggle and called again upon the reelected President and his Congress to act,”[8] and resolutions formed at these meetings were presented to the President a few days later. The last words she legendarily spoke on stage (“Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”) were taken up as a mantra by the National Women’s Party (NWP), and memorials for Milholland were held yearly, reinforcing her status as martyr for the cause of women’s suffrage.

Suffrage writing explicitly links the fate of Inez Milholland to the sufferings of the jailed suffragists a year later. “A year ago on November 25,” reads a piece published in the November 24th, 1917 issue of The Suffragist,

Inez Milholland laid down her gallant life “for liberty.” ... Because they persist in asking it [her famous question to President Wilson], thirty-four American women are in jail today. Worn and emaciated and suffering, the same vision lights the eyes of these “prisoners of freedom” that used to gleam before Inez Milholland as she lay in her hospital room.[9]

As this piece on the one-year anniversary of Milholland’s death and other articles in The Suffragist show,[10] Inez Milholland’s death lingered in the memories of women suffragists as an immediate and poignant reminder that women could die in the service of their cause.

Though none of the suffragists jailed in 1917 died, their circumstances nevertheless encompassed all other requirements that Weiner and Weiner identify as elements the martyrological confrontation, one of the conditions of martyrdom. Weiner and Weiner present a detailed script of this confrontation, which essentially consists of a public confrontation between a “dissident individual” (the “martyr-designate”) and the “ruling powers” (the “persecutor”). Typically, the initial confrontation is followed by threats and enticements from the persecutor and repudiations of the persecutor and continued affirmations of faith from the martyr-designate. This back-and-forth proceeds until the martyr-designate is killed.[11] All the stages of the suffragists’ confrontation with the Wilson administration—the picketing, arrests, trials, and jailing—followed this script, except for the fact that their ordeal did not end in death. The pickets, arrests, and trials all occurred in public spaces and were well publicized in both the suffrage and the mainstream press. Also very well publicized, especially by suffragist press, were the conditions that the pickets suffered in the jails and workhouses, including their maltreatment by penitentiary staff.

News surrounding the trials and the imprisonments, as well as published accounts afterwards, represent the ways in which the women enacted the roles of the martyr-designate, and the court and penal institution enacted the role of the persecutor. Suffragist Katharine Morey, describing to The New York Times the trial of the suffragists arrested on the Fourth of July, 1917, shows the court in the role of the enticing persecutor when she says that “the Judge was terribly worried when he found he had to fine them [the women]. He said that if they’d only please promise not to go to the White House again he’d let ’em go, but they wouldn’t promise, and so they all had to go to jail.”[12] According to Stevens’ account of the July 16th, 1917, trial of suffragists arrested for picketing the White House on Bastille Day, each woman took the opportunity to address the court not only to deny the legality of their arrests but also to declare, in what Weiner and Weiner would call a “reaffirmation of faith,” their reasons for picketing in the first place: women’s suffrage.

Anne Martin, one of the arrestees acting an attorney for the rest of the women, told the court:

“This is what we are doing with our banners before the White House, petitioning the most powerful representative of the government, the President of the United States, for a redress of grievances; we are asking him to use his great power to secure the passage of the national suffrage amendment.

“As long as the government and the representatives of the government prefer to send women to jail on petty and technical charges, we will go to jail.”[13]

A suffragist identified as “Mrs. John Rogers, Jr., descendant of Roger Sherman, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence” likewise reaffirmed, to objection from the prosecution, that “‘we [the accused suffragists] are not guilty of any offence, not even of infringing a police regulation. We know full well that we stand here because the President of the United States refuses to give liberty to American women.’”[14] After sentencing the suffragists to sixty days in the Occoquan workhouse or a twenty-five dollar fine, the judge, according to Stevens, “attempted persuasion” through a veiled threat: “‘You had better decide to pay your fines,’ he ventured and ‘you will not find jail a pleasant place to be.’” However, the picketers “would not of course pay the unjust fine imposed,” Stevens again reaffirms, “for we were not guilty of any offense.”[15] Describing her “Night of Terror” admittance to the Occoquan workhouse in The New York Times, Eunice Dana Brannan recounts that

when Mrs. Morey and three others [suffragist prisoners] were giving their names at the desk [Occoquan Workhouse Superintendent W. H.] Whittaker said to them, “If you will promise not to picket again, I will release you at once. I will take you back to Washington in my own car and you need not pay your fines.”[16]

When the judges and prison warden in these accounts cajole and/or threaten the suffragists, only to have them contest the legitimacy of their accusers and reaffirm their devotion to the cause of women’s suffrage, they perform the role of persecutor and martyr-designate as laid out by Weiner and Weiner, allowing the women to be constructed as martyrs when reports of their suffering in the prison and workhouse are disclosed.

The publication of such accounts, both of the trials and of the conditions post-sentencing, contributes to another of Weiner and Weiner’s elements of martyrdom: the martyrologial narrative. They claim that “martyrdom becomes influential through the narratives that celebrate it,” and that “the viability of the narrative’s transmission,” arguably the most important element in the creation of a martyr, “becomes the measure of the martyr’s significance.”[17] The martyrological narratives of the suffragists were constructed and disseminated as the events occurred through a combination of the suffrage media, the mainstream media, as well as through personal accounts published after the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.[18] Through these media, the narratives of the jailed women were shaped to fit the script of the martyrological confrontation, and their motive was clearly articulated; thus, the narrative of their martyrization was established and disseminated.

Smith states that one factor in the decline of the martyr lies in the Western European practice of granting to “political and altruistic criminals ... preferential treatment.”[19] According to Smith, their moral superiority and “the very loftiness of their motives shielded them from normal fear of punishment ... Martyrdom needed dissension and passion, and above all the violent emotional reaction of the legal machinery of state” to fulfill the requirements of the martyrological confrontation.[20] Yet the “preferential treatment” given to political prisoners was not, in fact, afforded to the suffragists by the authorities—Alice Paul and Rose Winslow first began hunger striking on November 6th, 1917 in order to demand that the suffragists be treated as political prisoners. The women were treated, according to the narratives, far worse than the other incarcerated criminals. The New York Times reported that, according to a bulletin released by Dr. Cora Smith King, Alice Paul’s physician, the suffragists were denied concessions that were accorded to “seventeen murderers, who have the privilege of special food, air, exercise, and the newspapers.”[21] Further, the women were brutally abused in the prison, workhouse, and psychiatric hospital that they were alternately incarcerated in. Narratives documenting the so-called “Night of Terror,” November 14-15, 1917—when thirty women in the process of being admitted to Occoquan Workhouse were attacked, and physically and psychologically abused for days—abound. The notes detailing that night, which Lucy Burns enabled to be smuggled out of the workhouse, were reprinted on the front page of The New York Times’ November 17th, 1917 edition,[22] as well as in The Suffragist.[23] Another woman present, Eunice Dana Brannan, had her testimony printed in The New York Times on November 29th, 1917[24] and later had a fuller account published in Stevens’ Jailed for Freedom.[25] Numerous statements concerning the same night from other suffragists involved are also included in Jailed for Freedom. These reports, not to mention the many widely-disseminated accounts of forced feeding from Alice Paul, Rose Winslow, Lucy Burns, and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, surely indicate a “violent emotional reaction of the legal machinery of state”[26] that was enabled because these women were denied treatment as political prisoners.

Smith further contends that martyrdom is ineffective and meaningless when stripped of any religious aspect.[27] Similarly, in what they consider the first secular manipulation of the martyrdom narrative, Weiner and Weiner argue that the artist David provided the French Revolution with images and speeches rife with religious martyrological imagery.[28] However, interestingly, they note that there is “a striking contrast in the depiction of the early Christian women martyrs, who are seen as brave, steadfast and unrelenting in their resolve, and the women of the French Revolution, who are portrayed by David as hopelessly mired in human sentiments.”[29] In constructing and disseminating their martyrological narratives the suffragists needed to evoke religious images and undertones both to provide the narratives with cultural power and to bypass David’s associations of women as politically ineffective and reengage with the figures of early Christian female martyrs. Though most of the narratives produced as the ordeals were occurring usually refrain from explicitly highlighting religion (other than Stevens’ multiple identifications of Alice Paul as “the Quaker,” and the naming as such of each Quaker that was jailed in her fourth appendix, “Suffrage Prisoners”), keeping their discourse within the legal, political, and human rights realms, the suffragists nevertheless employ several techniques to thematically associate the women with religious martyrs. Most notably, emphasis is placed on the physical weakness of the female suffragists[30] and their overwhelming devotion to the cause of female suffrage, paradoxically strong enough to support them through their physical suffering, in a manner reminiscent of early Christian female martyrs.

Rose Winslow’s “Prison Notes, Smuggled to Friends From the District Jail” poignantly illustrates these sentiments. Her body is weak: “quite feeble...—faint, so that I could hardly get my hair combed, my arms ached so.” She faints often, though she protests that it “probably means nothing except that I am not strong after these weeks.” On a “bad day,” which are all but one, she says, she “[vomits] continually during the process” of force feeding; she “always [weeps] and [sobs] to [her] great disgust, quite against [her] will,” which she considers “feeble-minded.” She rhetorically separates her mind from her body, indicating that her body further betrays her by “making the most hideous sounds” during forced feeding, “like an animal in pain,” and she thinks “how dreadful it was of me to make such horrible sounds.” Despite the physical degradation she and her fellow hunger strikers experience, however, she feels no compulsions to discontinue the hunger strike: “if this thing is necessary,” she says, “we will naturally go through with it. ... I feel so happy doing my bit for decency—for our war.” Their devotion to their cause allows the suffragists to rise like Winslow above their bodily torture. “Alice Paul is thin as ever, pale and large eyed,” and Winslow describes “the women” as “all so magnificent, so beautiful,”[31] evoking an image of serene suffering that matches the archetypal image of the religious martyr. The ability of an individual’s devotion to a cause to overcome physical pain is a well-documented aspect of the martyr narrative, as Smith explains.[32]

Though, unlike the religious martyrs Smith cites, the female suffragists do not wish to appear impervious to the pain of forced feeding, the fact that the physical torment deterred none of them from continuing the hunger strike adds credence to their conviction. Weiner and Weiner note that “the most impressive of the martyrs are hesitating human beings who are subject to doubt. ... Their convictions grow and solidify through trials and tribulations.”[33] Suffragist narratives demonstrably reflect this: thanks to outrage against the increasingly harsh jail terms and treatment within the jail, “‘more women,’” Lucy Burns told an audience of suffrage supporters on November 4th, 1917, “‘are ready to face imprisonment for six months than were ready a month ago to go to prison for three days.’”[34]

Finally, echoing Foucault, Smith declares that, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries punishment of deviancy shifted its focus from punishing the body to reforming the mind. Accordingly, he indicates, this shift is accompanied by a move away from public torture and execution to the secret, “retributive justice” of the prison and the “mental hygiene clinic.”[35] The treatment of the suffragists reflects this. First, the most prominent hunger striker, Alice Paul, was placed under observation in a psychiatric hospital, in an attempt to have her declared insane and thus invalidate her cause. Secondly, once the suffragists were incarcerated in either the workhouse or the jail, their contact with the outside world was strictly controlled. They were, according to Stevens, “kept absolutely incommunicado” with a maximum of one outgoing letter per month allowed, which was sent or withheld “at his [the warden’s] whim.”[36] Further, all visitors, even family members, were regularly denied contact with the women. Even their lawyer, with an order from the Court allowing him to see his clients, was at first refused entry.[37] In doing this, their persecutors clearly tried to deny the suffragists the public venue necessary for the enactment of the martyrological confrontation script. The suffrage movement’s extensive and powerful use of personal testimonials from the jailed suffragists and hunger strikers, both those smuggled out of the workhouses and jails and those delivered after a suffragist’s release, combatted this attempt. By publishing these testimonials in their periodical, The Suffragist, and disseminating them through more mainstream news sources such as The New York Times, the suffragists brought their confrontation with the Wilson Administration firmly back into the public sphere, where these and other testimonials could be immortalized in such accounts as Stevens’ Jailed for Freedom as part of the suffragists’ martyrological narratives.

Though, as Smith describes, it is perhaps impossible to be an authentic martyr in the twentieth century, the suffragists demonstrably engage with a martyrological script in the narratives of their suffering. What benefits, then, did this pseudo-martyriziation of the jailed suffragists afford the cause of women’s suffrage? Weiner and Weiner see “at the heart of the social purpose of martyrdom” a need to legitimize the formation of a group.[38] A martyrological sacrifice offers a powerful method to “justify and validate the convictions which lie at the root of a new group’s formation.”[39] Among other effects, a martyrological sacrifice solidifies a group that may have been somewhat equivocal, drawing attention to its cause, demonstrating the viability of defiance, and fatiguing and eroding the power of the persecutor.[40] A martyrological event, they claim, allows for the dual validation of the group’s belief and falsification of the dominant group’s belief.[41] All of these elements can be observed in the martyrological narratives produced by the suffragists. When Lucy Burns states that “‘more women are ready to face imprisonment for six months than were ready a month ago to go to prison for three days,’”[42] she highlights the polarizing force of the martyrological narratives the suffragists were disseminating. She asserts that a six-month prison term is the worst weapon in the Government arsenal, saying that “‘we [the suffragists] must disprove his [President Wilson’s] hope that while women might endure two months in prison for the sake of enfranchisement the prospect of a six months’ sentence would force them to give up their efforts,’”[43] and thereby reassures other suffragists that such challenges to the Administration were feasible. The narratives produced through the suffragists’ confrontations with the Wilson Administration, whether in the streets, in front of the White House, or behind the doors of a jailhouse, drew publicity and attention to the suffrage cause. Finally, every time a picket banner, suffrage orator, or editorial undermined a basic tenet of American society—freedom, democracy,[44] progress, and more—the suffrage cause was reaffirmed and the position of their persecutors weakened. The dissemination of the narratives of the jailed suffragists, particularly the hunger strikers, strengthened the suffrage cause and eroded the Administration’s policies. Constructing the suffragists as martyrs thereby contributed to the campaign’s revitalization in the three years before equal suffrage was granted, and assisted in its eventual success.

Notes

  • [1] Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), vii.
  • [2] Ibid., viii.
  • [3] Lacey Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1997, 10.
  • [4] Smith, 302.
  • [5] Ibid, 308.
  • [6] “Inez Milholland Boissevain,” Sewall-Belmont House & Museum, accessed 28 March 2012, http://www.sewallbelmont.org/womenwecelebrate/inez-boissevain/.
  • [7] Stevens, 48.
  • [8] Ibid.
  • [9] Beulah Amidon, “Inez Milholland,” The Suffragist, 24 November 1917, 9.
  • [10] See also the chronicle of a memorial service held on what would have been Milholland’s thirty-third birthday (Special Correspondent, “Inez Milholland Memorial Services,” The Suffragist, 23 August 1919, 6), for example.
  • [11] Weiner and Weiner, 10-11.
  • [12] “Women Will Renew White House Picket,” The New York Times, 9 July 1917, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9900EEDC133BE03ABC4153DFB....
  • [13] Quoted in Stevens, 102.
  • [14] Quoted in Ibid.
  • [15] Quoted in Ibid., 106.
  • [16] “Mrs. Brannan Tells of Jail Treatment,” The New York Times, 29 November 1917, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A03E5DF1E3AE433A2575AC2A....
  • [17] Weiner and Weiner, 12.
  • [18] Examples of the construction of the jailed and hunger-striking suffragists as martyrs are therefore taken from one source of each type: the NWP’s newspaper, The Suffragist; The New York Times, as an example of mainstream news circulation; and Doris Stevens’ personal account of her experiences in the militant movement, Jailed For Freedom, published in 1920.
  • [19] Ibid., 10.
  • [20] Ibid., 10-11.
  • [21] “Miss Alice Paul on Hunger Strike,” The New York Times, 7 November 1917, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A04E7D9123FE433A25754C0A....
  • [22] “Accuse Jailers of Suffragists,” The New York Times, 17 November 1917, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A03EEDB113AE433A25754C1A....
  • [23] “A Week of the Women’s Revolution,” The Suffragist, n.d., 4.
  • [24] “Mrs. Brannan Tells of Jail Treatment.”
  • [25] Stevens, 203-5.
  • [26] Smith, 10-11.
  • [27] Ibid., 302.
  • [28] Weiner and Weiner, 89-90.
  • [29] Ibid., 90.
  • [30] There are, of course, exceptions; Lucy Burns, in particular, is often portrayed quite physically. Compared to Alice Paul, who “[makes] no resistance” when dragged “the width of the White House sidewalk” (“‘How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?’”), Lucy Burns, “being more athletic than the others,” “[resists] strenuously” the attacks of Occoquan workhouse guards during the Night of Terror (“Accuse Jailers of Suffragists”).
  • [31] Rose Winslow, “Prison Notes, Smuggled to Friends From the District Jail,” The Suffragist, 1 December 1917, 6.
  • [32] Smith, 12-14.
  • [33] Weiner and Weiner, 11.
  • [34] Quoted in “Over the Top,” The Suffragist, 10 November 1917, 5.
  • [35] Smith, 308.
  • [36] Stevens, 141.
  • [37] “Accuse Jailers of Suffragists.”
  • [38] Weiner and Weiner, 53.
  • [39] Ibid., 54.
  • [40] Ibid., 55-7.
  • [41] Ibid., 58-60.
  • [42] Quoted in “Over the Top,” 5.
  • [43] Ibid.
  • [44] See, for example, the “‘President Wilson’s War Message’ Banner,” which reads, “‘We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the rights of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their government.’ President Wilson’s War Message, April 2nd 1917.”

Bibliography