About Lucy Burns
Lucy Burns (1879-1966) was an American suffragist born to an Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York.
Burns and Alice Paul co-founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916 after being ejected from the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) because of a difference of opinion about tactics for demanding change and exposing the injustice of the status quo.
Tired of President Woodrow Wilson’s passivity on suffrage, the tactic adopted by the National Woman’s Party was to send dozens of women to picket the White House in Washington, DC, beginning in January 1917, for eight hours a day, six days a week.
For their presumption, they were attacked by the White House, by male and female onlookers, and by the press--especially the New York Times.
Once the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Woodrow Wilson saw the opportunity to portray the picketers as unpatriotic and to shut down their campaign.
When Lucy Burns appeared on the picket line in July 1917 with a banner saying that Russian women had more freedom--they could vote--than American women, she and five others were arrested.
(A photograph of Lucy Burns in the Occoquan Workhouse.)
Altogether, Burns was arrested and jailed seven times—the most of any American suffragist. In prison, she was force-fed and possibly tortured. A historian recounts that force feeding Lucy Burns required "five people to hold her down, and when she refused to open her mouth, they shoved the feeding tube up her nostril."
After American women gained the right to vote in 1920, Burns retired from political life. Returning to Brooklyn to live with her family, she went on to rear a newborn niece left motherless in 1923 by the death of Burns's youngest sister in childbirth. Taking solace in her commitment to Roman Catholicism, she died in 1966 after a long decline.
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