Imagine having a passion to vote so strong that you’d picket your country’s presidential mansion for years on end, six days a week, 8 hours a day, sometimes huddled around a wood fire to stay warm. Now imagine that, in retribution for protesting the inability of half your country’s population to vote, you were transported to a “workhouse” where you were housed in a dark, frigid cell and there beaten and force-fed. Now, imagine that the country in question is the United States and that this could have happened to your great grandmother.
In The Story of the Woman’s Party by Inez Haynes Irwin, Harcourt Brace and Co. 1921 (https://bit.ly/WomensPartyBook), Inez describes the conditions of the suffragists’ imprisonment:
“The lower tier of cells was below the level of the ground. The doors of the cells were partly of solid steel and only partly of grating, so that little light penetrated. ... The toilet was open, the cots were of iron and without springs, and with a thin straw mattress on them. Outside, they left behind a day so hot as to be almost insupportable, but in the Workhouse it was so cold that their teeth chattered. It was damp all the time... Several of the pickets developed rheumatism. But the unendurable thing about it was the stench which came in great gusts. ...Most of the women believe they suffered with lead poisoning. They ached all over, endured a violent nausea, chills. However, all the twenty-six, with the exception of two elderly women went on hunger-strikes.” When protester Lucy Burns demanded blankets and hot water bottles of Superintendent Zinkham, he replied, “I know it is cold and damp ... but you can all get out of here by paying your fines.”
The women refused that option, feeling they had neither broken the law, nor been allowed their right to have a say in such. When their condition leaked to the media, it evoked so much outrage nationwide that it was considered by historians to be the “Turning Point” of public opinion forcing passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920.
The centennial we celebrate this year with the inauguration of the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial on August 26th in Lorton, Virginia, will commemorate a seven-decade struggle that engineered what its proponents call “the greatest single expansion of democracy the world had ever seen.”
Patricia Wirth, executive director of the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Association (https://suffragistmemorial.org/), defends this seeming hyperbole with the statistic that, when the 19th Amendment was certified by the Secretary of State and became law, 27 million American women 21 years of age or older could vote for the first time – in the United States.
In practice, Native American women living on reservations couldn’t vote until 1924. Asians and African Americans were often denied voting rights through poll taxes in the South until after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But, while the Civil Rights Era is well documented, Patricia says there’s no real monument commemorating what women endured to secure their portion of democracy.
The memorial now under construction is located within Occoquan Regional Park and the National Register listed D.C. Workhouse and Reformatory Historic District, part of the historic grounds where the women were imprisoned. The original concept for having a memorial there came from NOVA parks, which oversees that park and more than 30 other parks and historic properties in the state. A committee was formed in 2007 with the goal of having the memorial built by late summer this year. Robert Beach, an architect with ties to the group (http://www.rebarchitects.com/), attended one of their meetings in 2009, and has helped to oversee the project ever since.
The current plan, a drawing of which he’s holding in the photo, took about a year of research during which time Robert says he probably saw and touched every piece of memorabilia related to the suffragist movement. Most of it is currently housed in the Sewall-Belmont Museum next to the Hart Senate Office Building (https://bit.ly/S-BMuseum), where the National Women’s Party led by Alice Paul organized their marches and protests.
As he describes the current plan, it starts out with an entrance plaza framed by fencing like the Woodrow Wilson White House gates would have looked in 1917, complete with a cauldron they used to burn wood – and not a few of Wilson’s speeches – to keep warm. There will be a statue of Alice Paul, lead strategist of the movement to pass the 19th Amendment, in front and at least one banner. On the left will be the name of the memorial, and, on the right, there’ll be a donor wall.
Inside the gates will be a wall of plaques recognizing all the imprisoned suffragist women by name, another statue for Mary Church Terrell, an African American suffragist and founder of the NAACP, and Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and founder of the League of Women Voters. A large round plaza with 19 learning stations arrayed like a compass rose depicts the progression towards voting rights from Susan B. Anthony to 1920 in both pictures and text. An open-air rotunda in the center will have pillars named for the movement’s core principles: Liberty, Freedom, justice, Activism, Equality and Democracy.
Also included near the center is a bridge over a river rock arroyo symbolizing the passage from one century to the next and from darkness into light, that Patricia says is important to the planners who would like to see it used for bridge ceremonies for the Girl Scouts. Historically, Girl Scouts played an important role for women who had newly won the vote and needed babysitters to watch their children while they went to the polls, where children weren’t allowed.
Patricia says that, while her group’s main focus has been to raise money and plan the memorial, “Our mission is ‘to educate, inspire and empower present and future generations to remain vigilant in the quest for equal rights.’” Building the memorial is part of the education process, but, “we don’t want the education process to end there.” She says the intent is to establish a Turning Point Institute for girls in middle school and high school to help them understand the importance of advocacy when they have a passion for something. “It that way it may be a turning point in their own lives,” she explains, learning from the example of women who were so singularly committed to obtaining equal rights.
While she acknowledges the parallels to efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment – which Alice Paul herself wrote in 1923 and lived to see introduced in Congress in 1972 – Patricia says the group is strictly non-partisan and doesn’t support either legislation or political campaigns. Still, she notes, it is interesting that Virginia, which failed to ratify the 19th Amendment was the 38th and last state required to ratify the ERA. Wherever the ERA goes from here, “Our goal is to continue to talk about advocacy, and the importance of the Constitution as a living, breathing document that can change as needed. The memorial is important because it puts things in perspective about what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it!”
Robert affirms that construction began in March, though the symbolic ground-breaking took place on November 14, 2019, to recognize the date in 1917 when the suffragist protesters were first jailed. The push to finish by late August may be tough given the recent quarantines, but they’ll do their utmost to make it happen, he said. He’s grateful to have been working with “a very dynamic group of women – a great group of people – who are together probably just as impressive as the women they’re trying to recognize!”
Patricia allows that raising the $2.5MM-$3MM in funding and in-kind donations needed to build the memorial has been the hardest thing she’s ever done. She explains that few accomplished women seem to want to associate with the notion that they succeeded because they are women. Most donations have come in in small amounts from across the country – places like state chapters of the League of Women Voters, whose members, for all their commitment to democracy, often are stunned to learn how hard it was for women to win the right to vote. “This has been a truly grass-roots effort,” she says, adding that, “we’re almost there.”
We don’t doubt it. To quote Susan B. Anthony on her birthday in 2006 (the year she died), “With such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible.”