Prison Special

The "Prison Special" was a train tour organized by suffragists who, as members of the Silent Sentinels and other demonstrations, had been jailed for picketing the White House in support of passage of the federal women's suffrage amendment. In February 1919, 26 members of the National Woman's Party boarded a chartered train they dubbed the "Democracy Limited" in Washington, D.C. They visited cities across the country where they spoke to large crowds about their experiences as political prisoners at Occoquan Workhouse, and were typically dressed in their prison uniforms. The tour, which concluded in March 1919, helped create support for the ratification effort that ended with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920.

In the summer of 1917, members of the National Woman's Party (NWP) began to stage protests outside the White House in Washington, D.C., demanding the vote for women. Over the course of the summer and fall, many of the women were arrested, often on charges of obstructing traffic, and fined. When they refused to pay those fines, they were jailed. At first, penalties were relatively light, but as the Silent Sentinels persisted in their vigil, sentences became more harsh. In July and August of that year, women were sentenced to unusually harsh sentences of sixty days and many were imprisoned at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. In their belief that they were political prisoners, they refused to eat prison food, to perform work, or to wear the rough-cut prison uniforms provided to prisoners. By the fall, three of the women who had been participating in a hunger strike were subjected to forced feedings.

Public pressure forced officials to release the women held at Occoquan, but arrests continued throughout 1918 as the NWP intensified its lobbying efforts on behalf of women's suffrage. At the beginning of 1919, members of the NWP lit watch fires at both the White House and in nearby Lafayette Park, prompting another wave of arrests. Ultimately, 168 women would serve prison time. In February 1919, the woman's suffrage amendment was defeated by just one vote in the Senate. To secure public support and pressure legislators into passing the amendment before the end of the congressional session in March, the NWP launched a campaign they dubbed "From Prison to People," a three-week train tour across the United States.

Designed to educate the public about the "brutal and lawless measures of the Administration to suppress suffrage," the "Prison Special" train tour stopped at 16 cities across the United States to highlight the arrest, incarceration, and ill-treatment of women who had participated in protests supporting women's suffrage. The NWP members aboard the chartered train (nicknamed "The Democracy Limited") included veteran organizers Abby Scott Baker, Lucy Gwynne Branham, Lucy Burns, Mary Nolan (the NWP's "oldest picket"), Vida Milholland, Agnes Morey and Mabel Vernon.

To make their argument, they gave speeches from rented halls, train platforms, and automobiles, they sang jail songs from their time in prison, including "The Women's Marseillaise", and played the comb, they reenacted their arrests through dramatic readings, and they distributed pamphlets, including "Jailed for Freedom" (not to be confused with Doris Stevens' work published in 1920 under the same title). Perhaps most significantly, they dressed in replicas of their prison uniforms—described in the NWP publication, The Suffragist, as "calico wrappers designed exactly after the pattern of those which they were forced to wear in the work-house, thereby making the accounts of their experiences in the jail more vivid."

The tour was expensive and the cost—about $20,000—was funded by state branches of the NWP and individual donations from members. Louisine Havemeyer, a wealthy New York socialite and suffragist, also donated $1500 to the cause. William B. Thompson, a businessman, philanthropist, and supporter of women's suffrage, paid for the literature distributed during the tour. Ella Riegel managed tour logistics and Abby Scott Baker served as publicist.

The Prison Special left Union Station in Washington, D.C., on February 15, 1919, the anniversary of the birthday of women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony. The published itinerary included stops in the following cities:

The route moved systematically through the Southern states, where the NWP hoped to sway the sentiment of the Democratic Party, which had resisted the cause of women's suffrage, on to the Western states, where the NWP expected to rally women already enfranchised by their states to the cause of a federal amendment, and through the Northern states and the Northeast, ending in New York City. In addition to its published itinerary, the Prison Special also made several unscheduled stops which the women took full advantage of. In El Paso, Texas, a "flat wheel" on the Prison Special car forced an overnight stay. The El Paso Herald reports that Lucy Burns, Amelia Himes Walker Elizabeth McShane, and Sue Shelton White "preached the doctrine of suffrage" while other suffragists distributed literature to the gathered crowd. They carried flags with the suffrage colors of gold, purple, and white and stood on a step so that they could speak through the train platform's grill, which mimicked the bars of a prison. In an interview with the newspaper, Abby Scott Baker provided some insight into the women's experience as public speakers: "It is not easy to begin speaking on the street", she said. "Even though you are in the midst of a crowd, you have to begin talking to the air. But when you start out 'Ladies and gentlemen, the cause of liberty is sacred,' some of them will stop to see what is going on and, if you keep on, you will get them interested".