The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting white women's citizenship

ABSTRACT

During the spring of 1919, the National Woman's Party sponsored the Prison Special, a cross-country train tour of 26 white women who had been jailed as a result of their protest activity for woman suffrage. Using visual, embodied, and verbal enactments of imprisonment and civic action, the Prison Special constituted white women's citizenship through simultaneous rhetorics of inclusion and expulsion. The Prison Special's foregrounding of white women's martial capabilities, respectability, and vulnerability justified white women's inclusion in the category of citizen. The Prison Special's contrast of the imprisoned white suffragists to Black women co-prisoners participated in the expulsion of Black women from the category of citizen.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison Special
• woman suffrage
• body argument
• constitutive outside
• citizenship

Acknowledgments

Catherine H. Palczewski is Professor in the Communication Studies Department, and affiliate faculty in Women's & Gender Studies, at the University of Northern Iowa. This work was supported by the University of Northern Iowa with a Professional Development Assignment and by the UNI College of Humanities, Arts & Sciences under a Research Grant. I thank the archivists at the Library of Congress and the Sewall-Belmont House for their assistance. I thank my colleagues Danielle Dick McGeough, John Fritch, and Kyle Rudick, and the editor and peer reviewers of QJS for their extremely helpful comments and edits. Special thanks go to members of the 2015 RSA summer institute on Rhetorics of Citizenship and to Karma Chavez for the many challenging conversations that inspired and enabled me to take this essay where I never thought it would go. Earlier versions of this essay were presented as lectures at the 15th Biennial Wake Forest University Argumentation Conference, April 11–14, 2014; the NCA Institute for Faculty Development, Hope College, July 20–26, 2014; and the Doing Rhetoric at the U [of Minnesota] Conference, September 19–20, 2014.

Notes

1. The Prison Special,” The Suffragist, February 15, 1919, 5.

2. “The Prison Special,” February 22, 1919, 3. Newspaper reports of the Special noted their prominence (e.g., “‘Prison Special’ of 25 Suffrage Leaders Who Have Served Time in Jail is on Transcontinental Tour,” The Daily Twin Falls Times (ID) February 12, 1919, 2; “Suffragettes on ‘Prison Special’ Guests in City,” San Antonio Express, February 25, 1919, 13).

3. National Woman's Party, Special to International News Service, January 30, 1919, Library of Congress (LOC), National Woman's Party Records (NWPR), reel 92, frame 72.

4. “Jailed for Freedom: Some Phases in the Front Line of a War for Democracy Not Quite Won [Pamphlet]” (Washington D.C.: National Woman's Party, 1919). LOC.

5. Magic lanterns were the technological precursor to projectors used in slide shows. Using a concave mirror, magic lanterns could project an image, in this case photographs that were transferred onto a glass slide, onto any blank wall. Sadly, it appears that the set of slides disappeared from the Sewall-Belmont House archives at some point in the recent past.

6. “The Prison Special,” The Suffragist, February 8, 1919, 10.

7. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 1989); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1973); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965); Linda J. Lumsden, “Beauty and the Beasts: Significance of Press Coverage of the 1913 National Suffrage Parade,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 77, no. 3 (2000): 593–611; Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995).

8. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9. Although the Prison Special is mentioned in passing in a number of books, none devote extended attention to it beyond repeating what The Suffragist reported (e.g., Adams and Keene; Stillion Southard). Even Adams and Keene, who argue that what was missed in earlier analysis of Paul's activism was attention to her use of visual rhetoric, do not offer an extended analysis of the Prison Special. Zahniser and Fry spend less than a page on the tour.

10. E.g., Jennifer L. Borda, “The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910–1913: Possibilities and Limitations of an Early Feminist Rhetorical Strategy,” Western Journal of Communication 66, no. 1 (2002): 25–52; Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her; Sarah J. Moore, “Making a Spectacle of Suffrage: The National Woman Suffrage Pageant, 1913,” Journal of American Culture 20, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 89–103; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, “Militancy, Power, and Identity: The Silent Sentinels as Women Fighting for Political Voice,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 3 (2007): 399–418; Southard, Militant Citizenship. Stillion Southard does note that the NWP “transformed meanings of citizenship,” but she focuses on the assertion of political agency and civic engagement (Militant, 14).

11. Jorgensen-Earp's analysis of Constance Lytton's hunger strike is a notable exception. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, “‘The Waning of the Light’: The Forcible-feeding of Jane Warton, Spinster,” Women's Studies in Communication 22, no. 2 (Fall 1999), 125–51. See also Linda J. Lumsden, “Beauty and the Beasts: Significance of Press Coverage of the 1913 National Suffrage Parade,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 593–611. Lumsden and Jorgensen-Earp both speak to vulnerability. However, both position the vulnerability as a rhetorical appeal and not necessarily as a rethinking of citizenship.

12. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Daniell (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 36.

13. Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 141.

14. Karma Chavez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (February 2015): 162–72, 163.

15. Amy Brandzel, “Haunted by Citizenship: Whitenormative Citizen-Subjects and the Uses of History in Women's Studies,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 503–33, 504–5.

16. Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 15.

17. Brandzel, Against, 2.

18. Brandzel, Against, 15.

19. Textual reconstruction is a technique often used to reclaim speeches from members of marginalized groups. See Philip Sheldon Foner and Robert J. Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). The most complete texts of speeches are available in full-page coverage offered by the San Antonio Evening News (“Militants Beseech Local Women to Telegraph Wilson,” February 24, 1919, 8).

20. “The Prison Special,” February 15, 1919, 5.

21. Advocacy for suffrage used a range of media: organizational newspapers, public and congressional speeches, parades, pickets, editorials, print stories in commercial newspapers, pinbacks, pamphlets, and broadsides to name a few. Pamphlets distributed by both the NWP and NAWSA, as well as anti-suffrage organizations, typically would reprint leaders' speeches and favorable magazine articles (e.g., Alice Stone Blackwell, “Militant Methods,” NAWSA, reprinted from The Woman's Journal; Alice Stone Blackwell, “Objections Answered,” National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., Inc., Revised edition, May 1916; Alice Stone Blackwell, “Twelve Reasons Why Women Want to Vote,” The Woman's Temperance Publishing Association, National Leaflet No. 42; Minnie Bronson, “The Wage-Earning Woman and the State,” The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, circa 1913; Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State, pamphlet by same name; Mrs. A. J. George, “Woman's Rights vs Woman Suffrage,” The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, circa 1913; Harold J. Laski, “The Militant Wing and the Federal Suffrage Amendment,” The Dial, May 31, 1919, reprinted by National Woman's Party, LOC, NWPR. Mrs. Albert T. Leatherbee, “Why? Why Should Any Woman be an Anti-Suffragist?,” Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, Boston, MA, n.d.; Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, “Opinions of Eminent Persons Against Woman Suffrage, October 1912; Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, “Of What Benefit to Woman?,” n.d.; Doris Stevens, “The Militant Campaign,” Omaha Daily News, June 29, 1919, reprinted by NWP, LOC, NWPR; Frances E. Willard, “Should Women Vote?,” The Woman's Temperance Publishing Association, National Leaflet No. 47. Broadsides (printed only on one side) also were usually entirely verbal (e.g., New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association's “True Democracy”; and the Women's Anti-Suffrage Association of Massachusetts's “Feminism and Woman Suffrage,” “Men of Massachusetts!,” “Why the Farmer Should Oppose Woman Suffrage,” “Woman Suffrage and Prohibition,” “Woman Suffrage and Taxation,” “Woman Suffrage Going, Not Coming,” all circa 1915).

22. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship, 2, 9.

23. Stillion Southard, “Militancy,” 410.

24. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship, chapter 3.

25. Quoted in Mrs. B. Hazard, “New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage,” The Chautauquan (June 1910): 88.

26. Elihu Root in “Opinions.”

27. Rossiter Johnson in “Opinions.”

28. “Jailed,” 1.

29. Lucy G. Branham, Julia Emory, Bertha Arnold, Katherine Morey, Elizabeth Kalb, and Jessie Benton MacKaye participated in the protest.

30. “The Later Demonstrations,” The Suffragist, August 24, 1918, 5.

31. “Jailed,” 12.

32. “Jailed,” 10.

33. National Woman's Party, Special to International News Service, January 30, 1919, LOC, NWPR, reel 92, frame 73.

34. Adams and Keene, 239.

35. “Women's Marseillaise,” in Literature of the Women's Suffrage Campaign in England, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (London: Broadview Press, 2004), 170. Words, F. E. M. Macaulay, 1909. Music, Rouget Delisle, 1792.

36. “Jailed,” 2.

37. See the “Inez Milholland Memorial Number” issue of The Suffragist, December 23, 1916, and the issue “In Memory of Inez Milholland,” The Suffragist, December 30, 1916).

38. “Opinions.”

39. “Jailed,” 14.

40. “Jailed,” 4.

41. Adams and Keene, 239. See also “The Prison Special Tour Ends,” The Suffragist, March 29, 1919, 4–6, 4–5 on Rogers's and Bennett's contributions; “Prison Special Arouses the South,” The Suffragist March 8, 1919, 6–10, 9 on Winsor's contribution. A completely different lineup of Baker, Burns, Rogers, White, and Windsor is described in “The Prison Special Through the West,” The Suffragist, March 22, 1919, 7–9, 8.

42. “Women Say Borah's Promise Is No Good,” The Boston Daily Globe, March 10, 1919, 1–2, 2.

43. “Prison Special Arouses the South,” 10.

44. “Suffragettes on ‘Prison Special’ Guests in City,” San Antonio Express, February 25, 1919, 13.

45. Elizabeth S. Rogers letter to Miss Paul, January 23, 1919. Library of Congress, National Woman's Party Papers, reel 68, frame 7.

46. Rogers letter to Paul, January 23, 1919.

47. National Woman's Party, January 1919 Press Release, LOC, NWPR, reel 92, frame 82.

48. “The Prison Special Tour Ends,” The Suffragist, March 29, 1919, 4–6; “Women Say,” 2.

49. “Prison Special Arouses the South,” 9. See also “Militants Demand a Special Session,” New York Times, March 11, 1919, 10. “Women Say,” 2.

50. As cited in “The Prison Special Through the West,” 8.

51. “Private Car for 26 Fair Jail Birds,” The Syracuse Herald, March 2, 1919, 1.

52. “Society Plans Welcome for ‘Prison Special,’” Oakland Tribune, January 30, 1919, 9.

53. “Militants Seek Local Women to Demand Suffrage,” San Antonio Evening News, February 24, 1919, 8.

54. “Militants Seek Local Women to Demand Suffrage,” 8.

55. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).

56. “Jailed,” 12–13.

57. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 10.

58. Carolyn Vance Bell, “Suffragist ‘Jail Birds’ Tour Nation on ‘Prison Special,’” Chester Times (PA), February 8, 1919, 5.

59. Nation Woman's Party, Press Release, February 6, 1919, LOC, NWPR, reel 92, frame 92.

60. “The Prison Special,” The Suffragist, February 15, 1919, 5.

61. Katherine Feo Kelly, “Performing Prison: Dress, Modernity, and the Radical Suffrage Body,” Fashion Theory 15, no. 3 (2011): 299–321, 303.

62. Juliet Ash, Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 28.

63. Carmen Ballen, “San Francisco Stirred by Pleas of Nation Campaigners,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 28, 1919, as reprinted in “The Prison Special Through the West,” 7.

64. An International News Service story, “‘Prison Special’ of Suffrage Leaders Who Have Served Time in Jail Is on Transcontinental Tour Today,” appeared in The Daily Examiner (Connersville, IN), February 7, 1919, 4; The Daily Twin Falls Times (ID), February 12, 1919, 2. Variations on Vance's “Suffragist ‘Jail Birds’ Tour Nation on ‘Prison Special’” story appeared in Chester (PA) Times, February 8, 1919, 5; Fitchburg Daily Sentinel (MD), February 7, 1919, 10; The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, February 25, 1919; The Morning Herald (Hagerstown, MD), February 8, 1919, 10; The Kokomo Daily Tribune (IN), February 7, 1919, 5; Lebanon Daily News, February 7, 1919, The Daily Tribune (Logansport, IN), February 7, 1919, 3; The Ogden Standard (UT), February 10, 1919, 6. A range of other stories, some only as long as one paragraph, also mentioned the prison garb: “26 Go on ‘Prison Special,’” The Washington Post, February 16, 1919, 17; “Ex-Prisoners on Tour,” New York Tribune, February 15, 1919, 13; “Militant Suffragettes,” The Lima Sunday News (OH), February 16, 1919, 4; “On Prison Special,” Warren Evening News (PA), February 18, 1919, 8; “Plead Extra Session for Suffrage Act,” The Syracuse Herald, March 9, 1919, 1; “‘Prison Special’ Arrives at S.F.,” Bakersfield Morning Echo (CA), March 1, 1919, 1; “Prison Special Leaves Capitol for the South,” The Anniston Star (AL), February 16, 4; Starts on Tour of Country,” Richmond Times Dispatch (VA), February 16, 1919, 1; “Suffragist ‘Prison Special’ Arrives: Members Tell About Terms Served,” Oakland Tribune, February 28, 1919, 14; “Suffragists of Prison Special Welcomed in S.F.,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, March 1, 1919; “Suffragists off in ‘Prison Special,’” New York Times, February 16, 1919, 16; “Woman's Party Heads Meet Here to Plan Week's Suffrage Fight,” New York Tribune, February 1, 1919, 5.

65. “‘Prison Special’ of Suffrage Leaders Who Have Served Time in Jail is on Transcontinental Your Today,” The Daily Examiner, February 7, 1919, 7.

66. Bell, 5. See also Carolyn Vance Bell in Fitchburg Daily Sentinel (MA), February 7, 1919, 10; The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, February 25, 1919; The Morning Herald (Hagerstown, MD), February 8, 1919, 10; The Kokomo Daily Tribune (IN), February 7, 1919, 5; Lebanon Daily News, February 7, 1919, The Daily Tribune (Logansport, IN), February 7, 1919, 3; The Ogden Standard (UT), February 10, 1919, 6.

67. “The Prison Special Through the West,” 8.

68. “The Prison Special Through the West,” 8.

69. “The Prison Special Through the West,” 7.

70. “The Prison Special Through the West,” 7.

71. “The Prison Special Through the West,” 9.

72. “Plead Extra Session for Suffrage Act,” The Syracuse Herald, March 9, 1919, 1.

73. National Woman's Party, Special to International News Service, January 30, 1919, LOC, NWPR, reel 92, frame 73.

74. “Jailed,” 9, 12–13.

75. “Jailed,” 14.

76. E.g., the digitally available image of a “Cell in D.C. jail” that centers the toilet (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mnwp.160050) or the photograph of an open toilet located in the LOC, NWPR, Box 1: 160, “Pickets, 1917” folder.

77. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 133.

78. For those who are unfamiliar with the history of the “race problem,” the NWP did not defend Black women's enfranchisement. In a 1915 in an essay in The Suffragist, Helena Hill Weed (who planned the Prison Special's itinerary) argued “the enfranchisement of Southern women would enormously increase the white supremacy” because white women outnumber Black women and a state could disenfranchise Black women in the same way they had Black men (Helena Hill Weed, “The Federal Amendment and the Race Problem,” The Suffragist, February 6, 1915, 3). During the Prison Special's stop in San Antonio, Lucy Burns echoed Weed's argument: “The Federal amendment does not complicate the race problem. There are south of Mason and Dixon line more than six million more white women than negro women and more than two million more white women than negro men and women combined. After the passage of the suffrage amendment the States will have the same right to impose upon voters any qualifications whatever just as they now have. . . .” (“Women Assert Picketing Has Helped Cause,” San Antonio Evening News, February 24, 1919, 8). According to Burns, enfranchising white women is a way to contain the Black vote, and if race is the basis of disenfranchising Black women, then woman suffrage advocates accept that.

79. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction,” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 1–14 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7.

80. Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 14.

81. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers, 14.

82. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers, 20.

83. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers, 127.

84. Paula Giddings, “The Last Taboo” in Race-ing Justice, En-gender-ing Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison, 441–63 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 450.

85. Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 107.

86. John W. Jacks quoted in Shirley Wilson Logan, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 120.

87. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 204–42, 229.

88. Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 170–82 (New York: Routledge, 1997), 173.

89. “Jailed,” 13.

90. Gilman, 231

91. Gilman, 231.

92. National Woman's Party, “The Truth About Washington Pickets,” broadside, circa 1917, LOC, NWPR, reel 93, frame 185.

93. “First Woman to Start Liberty Fires in Washington,” The Ogden Standard, March 3, 1919, 7.

94. “The Punishment of the ‘Pickets,’” Broadside, reprint of Macon Telegraph article, circa 1917, LOC, NWPR reel 93, frame 184.

95. “The Punishment of the ‘Pickets.’”

96. Butler, Gender Trouble, 133–34.

97. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, “Lilies and Lavatory Paper: The Public and the Private in British Suffrage Archives,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan, 229–49 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Company, 2010), 233.

98. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.

99. Library of Congress, “About this Collection,” retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/collection/women-of-protest/about-this-collection/

100. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom. The photo appears between pages 114 and 115.

101. Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, ed. Carol O'Hare (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press), 1995.

102. David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner, 19–32 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 26.

103. Susan Zaeske and Sarah Jedd, “From Recovering Women's Words to Documenting Gender Constructs,” in in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan, 184–202 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Company, 2010), 195.

104. Jessica Enoch, “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography Without the Tradition,” in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Ballif, 58–73 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 59.

105. See Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (Summer 1999): 9–21.

106. Cara A. Finnegan, “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, 195–214 (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004), 198.

107. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul; Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship.

108. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7.

109. Mayhall, 7.

110. Catherine H. Palczewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 4 (November 2005): 365–94.

111. Enoch, 72.

112. Brandzel, “Haunted,” 518.

113. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 145.

114. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–50.

115. Robert Elliot Mills, “The Pirate and the Sovereign: Negative Identification and the Constitutive Rhetoric of the Nation-State,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17, no. 1 (2014): 105–35, 108.

116. Mills, 129.

117. Butler, Notes, 148.

118. Brandzel, Against, 5.

119. Butler, Notes, 21–22.

120. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound up Together,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory 1787–1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 456–60.