They stood in front of the White House all day, every day (except for Sundays) for two and a half years, bearing silent witness to women’s voting rights denied.
Dressed in white, with purple and gold sashes draped over their shoulders, the Silent Sentinels, as these women were known, stood in rain, snow, heat and blinding sun, holding banners demanding that President Woodrow Wilson announce his support for an amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing women the right to vote.
In all, more than 2,000 women picketed the White House from January 10, 1917, the day after Wilson dismissed the demands of 350 suffragists in an East Room meeting, until June 4, 1919 when Congress passed the 19th Amendment.
The silent White House protest was the brain child of suffragist Alice Paul, co-founder in 1916 of the National Woman’s Party. By then, women had spent more than 70 years trying to get the vote, mainly by lobbying individual states to pass their own suffrage laws. Paul believed differently, pushing instead for a constitutional amendment that would make women’s voting rights a national law.
At first, President Wilson would tip his hat to the Silent Sentinels when he arrived at the White House, ignoring the banners on which they’d painted his own words. (He would be less charitable when they protested during his second inauguration speech in January 2019.)
By summer, the police intervened. Dozens of protesters were arrested for the dubious charge of blocking traffic. Most refused to pay the fines and were jailed and beaten. Some of the women wrote letters to the NWP’s weekly newspaper, The Suffragist, describing what happened to them in jail, including being force-fed when they went on hunger strikes.
Word got out, and public interest in the daily protests grew. Supporters would come with food for the women; others gave them hot and cold drinks, and even hot bricks for them to stand on in the winter. The anti-suffragists showed up too, heckling the protesters, throwing rotten food at them, ripping up their banners and even physically attacking them.
Still, they stood outside the White House, never saying a word.
By fall, the number of suffragists being arrested, and the harsh conditions under which they were held, prompted Congress, after a contentious debate, to create a committee on women’s suffrage.
The protests continued, and punishments got worse. In October, Alice Paul was sent to jail for seven months. She spent two weeks in solitary confinement with only bread and water to eat before being transferred to the jail hospital, where she began a hunger strike.
One horrific episode known as the Night of Terror took place on November 14, when the superintendent of Occoquan Workhouse, a facility in Virginia where arrested protesters were being sent, ordered the prison’s 40 guards to beat the suffragists held there. News of the brutal violence resulted in more popular support for the suffragists, and two weeks later all of the women were released, including Alice Paul. Later, six of the convictions were overturned.
The Silent Sentinels upped the pressure, burning banners with the president’s words in metal barrels in front of the White House, and then Wilson’s effigy too. Finally, in a speech to Congress in January of 2018, President Wilson announced his support of the women’s suffrage movement. The House passed the voting rights amendment the next day, but the Senate refused to take it up until October, when it was defeated.
Still, the picketers stayed at their posts.
With the 1918 general election coming up, the NWP urged its male supporters (the only ones who could vote at the time) to elect pro-suffrage candidates into Congress — and in part due to the publicity surrounding the Silent Sentinels’s protest, they did.
On June 4, 1919 both houses of Congress approved the 19th amendment, sending it to the states for ratification.
That same day, the picketers left their posts.