Medics Militant
White House picket, 1917 (Library of Congress)
Despite increased visibility, little progress was made on state-level suffrage campaigns in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, leading to frustration among activists.
In 1910, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns returned to the United States from England, bringing with them the British suffragists’ militant tactics and a renewed demand for a Constitutional amendment.
After disagreement with the more moderate NAWSA, Paul and her supporters started a new group, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), that pressured politicians with acts of civil disobedience such as picketing and hunger strikes.
The United States entry into World War I, which placed unprecedented demands on female workers and medical personnel, provided another argument for women’s right to vote. Suffragists in Baltimore joined the front lines of service and protest, voicing their demands in parades, on street corners, and at the White House gates. Their organizing network was so robust that even the 1918 flu pandemic, which made mass events impossible, did not cause them to lose ground.
Illustration in the Brooklyn Magazine, 1917 (Library of Congress)
Ellen La Motte, The Backwash of War
Johns Hopkins nurses in World War I, wearing gas masks, 1918 (Chesney Archives)
Women's Oversea Hospitals, U.S.A., pamphlet (UNC Greensboro)
Women at war
The valor of nurses during wartime made a dramatic case for equality, although some suffragists were also pacifists and objected to the idea that citizenship must be earned through participation in war.
Hopkins nursing alum Ellen La Motte’s political beliefs compelled her to leave her post in the Baltimore health department and join radical suffrage actions in the UK. At the outbreak of World War I, La Motte volunteered near the front lines. Her searing anti-war book about the horrors she witnessed was banned in England and France.
The Army Nurse Corps urgently recruited more than 20,000 nurses when the US entered World War I in 1917. Many Hopkins nurses served overseas at Base Hospital 18 in France. The Johns Hopkins Nursing Alumnae Magazine brimmed with patriotism and praise for the war effort, but its editorials also made clear that “the ideals for which we are fighting” included “the right to a voice in one’s own government.”
The Women’s Oversea Hospitals were funded by the National American Women's Suffrage Association and staffed entirely by female physicians and nurses. They provided healthcare to civilians and refugees as the devastation of war was compounded by the deadly “Spanish flu” pandemic. The toll of the 1918 flu led to more demand for female workers in both medical and industrial settings.
Dr. Mabel Seagrave, a 1911 Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine graduate, served at a Women's Oversea Hospital in France as a general surgeon. When they weren’t working, hospital volunteers gave suffrage lectures which Seagrave recorded in her diary.