Lucy Burns

1879-1966

Lucy Burns was noted as having spent more time in jail than any other American suffragist. Her illustrious rise to suffragist notoriety started from more humble beginnings. She graduated from Vassar College in 1902 and went on to study etymology at Yale University from 1902-1903. From 1904-1906 she taught English at the Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn before resuming her study of languages at the University of Berlin in 1906-1908 and the University of Bonn from 1908-1909. Her father supported her intellectual ambitions and his financed her years of study.

After meeting the English suffragists, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, on a visit to England, Burns threw herself into the woman suffrage cause, dropping her studies in Berlin to move to London where she became very active with the Pankhursts' organization, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Between 1910 and 1912, Burns was employed by WSPU as an organizer. The WSPU members spoke on street corners, staged pageants, organized marches, and engaged in civil disobedience. Burns was given a special medal of valor by the WSPU for her dedication, having been arrested several times and joined in prison hunger strikes in July and September of 1909.

Burns met Alice Paul in England and when she returned to the United States in 1912 she and Paul teamed up to orchestrate a campaign for a women's suffrage amendment to the Constitution. Their work to further suffrage on a national level conflicted with the state-by-state strategy endorsed by National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). After several years of battling with the leadership of NAWSA, then led by Anna Howard Shaw, in 1916, Paul and Burns founded the National Women's Party (NWP) to organize a constitutional amendment for women's suffrage. Burns played a leading role in the NWP as chief organizer, newspaper editor, suffrage educator, orator, architect of the banner campaign, rallying force, and symbol of the NWP. Burns was very saavy about the media and, in her suffrage schools, taught women how to conduct automobile campaigns, lobby, and work with the press.

Paul and Burns were both committed to a confrontational strategy that would raise the profile of the suffrage issue and hold both Democratic and Republican legislators accountable. Between 1913 and 1919, Burns was arrested for a variety of suffrage activities. In 1917, after her arrest for picketing the White House, she went on a 19-day hunger strike and was force-fed. Once Congress passed the suffrage amendment, Burns retired from public life to reside with two of her unmarried sisters and raise her infant niece, following the death of her sister from childbirth.

Source: Biographies Plus, Notable American Woman, the Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (1980)