English: Women hold banners at the White House gates January 11, 1917, the day after their “silent sentinel” campaign for the women’s right to vote began.

The banner on the right reads, ""Mr. President, what will you do for woman suffrage?"

The campaign was organized by Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party after President Woodrow Wilson refused in a meeting held January 9th to openly support women’s suffrage. The silent tactic was new to the women’s rights movement and represented the moral high ground.

From January 10, 1917 through June 4, 1919 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed both by the House of Representatives and the Senate, silent women carried banners reminding Wilson and the public about his lack of support.

The protests were staged six days a week and were at first tolerated by authorities. However beginning June 22, 1917, police began arresting the sentinels.

As the suffragists kept protesting, the jail terms grew longer. Finally, police arrested Alice Paul on October 20, 1917, while she carried a banner that quoted Wilson: "The time has come to conquer or submit, for us there can be but one choice. We have made it."

She was sentenced to seven months in prison. Paul and many others were sent to the Occoquan Workhouse, where Paul was placed in solitary confinement for two weeks, with nothing to eat except bread and water. She became weak and unable to walk, so she was taken to the prison hospital. There, she began a hunger strike, and others joined her.

In response to the hunger strike the prison doctors force fed the women by putting tubes down their throats. They force fed them substances that would have as much protein as possible, like raw eggs mixed with milk. Many of the women ended up vomiting because their stomachs could not handle the protein.

One physician reported that Alice Paul had "a spirit like Joan of Arc, and it is useless to try to change it. She will die but she will never give up." Lucy Burns suffered injuries from force feeding, so after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, she was unable to continue to work with Paul.

On the night of November 14, 1917, known as the "Night of Terror", the superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, W.H. Whittaker, ordered the nearly forty guards to brutalize the suffragists.

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, then left her there for the night. They threw Dora Lewis into a dark cell and smashed her head against an iron bed, which knocked her out. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, who believed Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. Dorothy Day, who later co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was slammed repeatedly over the back of an iron bench. Guards grabbed, dragged, beat, choked, pinched, and kicked other women.

Newspapers carried stories about how the protesters were being treated. The stories angered some Americans and created more support for the suffrage amendment. On November 27 and 28, all the protesters were released, including Alice Paul after spending five weeks in prison.

Later, in March 1918, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated six suffragists' convictions. The court held that the information on which the women's convictions were based were overly vague.

The “silent sentinels” were part of a nationwide campaign in nearly every city and town that involved demonstrations, parades, pickets, petitions, meetings and rallies.

The amendment was ratified by the states August 18, 1920 with Tennessee, the thirty-sixth and last state to do so by the single vote of a legislator (Harry T. Burn) who had opposed the amendment but changed his position after his mother sent him a telegram saying "Dear Son, Hurrah! and vote for suffrage. Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification.”

--partially excerpted from Wikipedia

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Photograph is probably by Terence V. Powderly. Courtesy of the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Terence Vincent Powderly Photographic Prints.