Martyr for the Cause
After the Chicago convention the NWP worked nonstop to keep suffrage on the minds of the politicians in Washington and of the American people. Envoys traveled throughout the country speaking on behalf of suffrage in nearly every state in the Union. None worked harder than Inez Milholland Boissevain, the same beautiful young woman who had led the parade in Washington; she had a speaking schedule that traveled over 12 states. She, along with Paul, had a determination and stubbornness to continue despite warnings from friends and her physician. She sustained her grueling schedule, sometimes "taking a train at two in the morning to arrive at eight, then a train at midnight to arrive at five in the morning" (Clift, 2003, p. 113). Maud Younger, an envoy that traveled with Boissevain stated, "she would come away from audiences and droop as a flower" (Clift, 2003, p. 113). Finally, at a rally in Los Angeles, her strength gave out. As she delivered another fiery speech saying passionately, "Mr. President, how much longer must women wait for liberty?" she collapsed to the floor and died ten weeks later, on November 25, 1916 (Clift, 2003). The death of Boissevain shocked the nation and provided even more motivation for her fellow suffragists, who saw her as the first martyr for the cause.
*Inez Milholland Boissevain (center) in 1916, before she began her last speaking tour (Records of the National Woman's Party, 1916).
*Inez Milholland Boissevain (center) in 1916, before she began her last speaking tour (Records of the National Woman's Party, 1916).
Picketing the President
In 1917, the NWP began a silent picket at the White House, becoming the first political group to employ this tactic (Mayo, 2007). The picketers did not attract much attention at first, however, as days went by and the women remained stationed at the gates to the White House people began to take notice. Lawmakers and anti-suffragist scoffed at the women, but as time went on their humor evaporated into annoyance and anger. This attention was exactly what the suffragists wanted, as Doris Stevens, a picketer, states in her memoir of this time, "no wonder these gentlemen found the pickets irritating...here were American women before their very eyes daring to shock them into having to think about liberty. And what was worse-liberty for women...yet, of course, we enjoyed irritating them. Standing on the icy pavement on a damp, wintry day in the penetrating cold of a Washington winter, knowing that within a stone's throw of our agony there was a greater agony than ours-there was joy in that!" (Stevens, 1976, p. 64).
*College students picketing the White House, each woman wears a sash bearing the name of her school. The NWP's radical tactics resonated with younger women who had grown up in the twentieth century (Records of the National Woman's Party, 1917).
*College students picketing the White House, each woman wears a sash bearing the name of her school. The NWP's radical tactics resonated with younger women who had grown up in the twentieth century (Records of the National Woman's Party, 1917).