First Suffragist Arrests Begin for White House Picketing as State Repression Escalates

On June 22, 1917, police arrested six suffragists for picketing the White House, initiating a campaign of state repression against the Silent Sentinels that would eventually result in 168 National Woman’s Party members serving time in prison. The arrests came after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, when public tolerance for the suffragists’ protests evaporated and they were increasingly viewed as disloyal to the war effort. Eleven more women were detained on July 4, followed by a third group ten days later, establishing a pattern of escalating arrests for the charge of “obstructing traffic”—a pretext that exposed how legal systems could weaponize minor ordinances to suppress political dissent. Alice Paul made the strategic decision to ensure picketing would continue regardless of arrests, understanding that state repression would generate publicity and potentially sympathy for the suffrage cause.

The arrested suffragists were convicted and incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia and the District of Columbia Jail, where they endured conditions designed to punish and intimidate them into abandoning their protest. Most suffrage prisoners came from sheltered, privileged backgrounds, yet they faced dark, unsanitary, rat-infested conditions, contaminated food, manhandling, forced prison labor, and intentional incarceration with the general prison population. Prison officials frequently withheld their mail, isolating them from outside support networks. The treatment violated basic standards for humane detention and demonstrated how institutional power structures would deploy degrading conditions against those challenging their authority, particularly when those challengers were women transgressing expected bounds of feminine behavior. The Wilson administration’s willingness to imprison peaceful protesters for demanding democratic rights exposed the hollow nature of its wartime rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy.

The arrests revealed the selective application of law enforcement authority to protect existing power structures. The suffragists had picketed the White House for six months without interference before U.S. entry into the war, demonstrating that their arrest was politically motivated rather than based on genuine public safety concerns. The charge of “obstructing traffic” was absurd given that the women stood quietly at the White House gates holding banners, while the actual obstruction came from hostile crowds attacking them. This pattern of charging protesters with crimes committed by those opposing them would become a recurring tactic of state repression. By the end of the campaign, 168 women had been arrested and imprisoned for the peaceful exercise of political speech, many sentenced to months of incarceration for holding signs. This mass imprisonment of women demanding voting rights would ultimately backfire on the Wilson administration when reports of brutal treatment generated public outrage and forced the president to reverse his opposition to suffrage.