Nurses Storm the Gates

Cover of The Suffragist by Nina Allender, 1917

As the shadow of war reached across the Atlantic, suffragists waged an increasingly bold and relentless campaign for the vote at home.

These are the stories of four Hopkins-affiliated nurses who represent the most determined tactics of the suffrage movement in its final stages.

Many nurses did not support suffrage for a variety of reasons, leading to intense debates within their professional groups. However, no records were found of Hopkins nurses or nursing alumni who publicly opposed the vote for women.

Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, graduating class of 1903 (Chesney Archives)

Easton Emergency Hospital, postcard (Chesney Archives)

Dixon stands third from the left on the picket line of Nov. 10, 1917 (Library of Congress)

Mary Bartlett Dixon Cullen

The daughter of a wealthy Maryland family, Mary Bartlett Dixon sought independence by attending the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, graduating in 1903. She helped to establish the first hospital and nursing school on Maryland’s Eastern shore in 1907. In addition to teaching, she took on leadership roles in the state graduate nurses association, and in its two leading suffrage organizations. When the American Nurses Association voted down a suffrage resolution in 1908, she began a vigorous letter-writing campaign asserting that nurses could not remain neutral.

Dixon was one of five suffrage leaders who met with President Woodrow Wilson weeks after he took office in 1913, demanding his support for a constitutional amendment. Wilson refused, as did the Maryland congressmen whom Dixon lobbied as the chair of the Just Government League’s legislative committee.

Suffragists began picketing the White House after another failed meeting with Wilson in January 1917, becoming the first group to do so. Calling themselves “silent sentinels,” they produced banners quoting Wilson’s wartime rhetoric about “the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments.” Dixon was arrested and spent two days at the notorious Occoquan workhouse, where previously suffragists had been beaten by guards.

Colvin in front of the National Women's Party headquarters, 1918

Route of the "Suffrage Special," April-May 1916 (Library of Congress)

Suffragists demonstrating against Woodrow Wilson in Chicago, 1916

National Women's Party watchfires burn outside White House, Jan. 1919 (Library of Congress)

Colvin, front row second from the right, on the “Prison Special,” 1919 (Public Domain)

Imprisoned suffragists Vida Milholland, Abby Scott Baker, Lucy Branham, and Mrs. Sarah T. Colvin, 1919

Sarah Tarleton Colvin

Sarah Tarleton Colvin trained at Johns Hopkins and established the Baltimore Visiting Nurses’ Association in 1895, reflecting nursing’s growing concern with public health. However, when she married Dr. John Colvin in 1897, it was considered improper for her to continue working. She moved with her husband to St. Paul, and became a leader in the movement to professionalize and regulate nursing in Minnesota.

Her increasing political involvement convinced her that women needed representation in government; she believed that nurses’ professional interests and concerns aligned with those of the working class, and advocated for the regulation of industry, pay equity, and universal public health insurance.

On a visit to Washington, DC, in 1915, Colvin learned about Alice Paul’s plan for a national suffrage amendment. She joined Paul’s faction, then called the Congressional Union, and started a Minnesota chapter. In 1916, she was one of 23 riders on the “Suffrage Special,” a chartered train that made a whistle-stop tour around the west. The tour ended with a demonstration in Chicago, where Colvin recalled being “suddenly attacked by a group of men who hurled themselves at us in a flying tackle." There, Paul announced the formation of the National Woman’s Party. Colvin became a motive force in the NWP.

While volunteering as a Red Cross nurse in Baltimore in January, 1919, Colvin took a train to Washington to engage in a new form of protest: suffragists lit “watch fires” in urns beside the White House gates, burning President Wilson’s speeches and eventually burning the President in effigy. This gesture drew criticism because Wilson had changed his position a year earlier and publicly endorsed suffrage; demonstrators felt that his efforts remained inadequate. Colvin was arrested and sentenced to five days in jail, where she went on a hunger strike. A few weeks after her release, she and thirty others were again arrested at the “largest and most spectacular demonstration we pulled off.”

Upon her second release from jail, Colvin joined twenty-five other suffragists on the “Prison Special,” a sixteen-city train tour showcasing “the lawless and brutal lengths to which the Administration has gone to suppress the lawful agitation for suffrage.” After the tour, she returned to Minnesota and resumed her political work. Reflecting on the women’s suffrage movement, she felt dissatisfied that it never included “discussion about economic inequalities.” Even with the vote, for many women and men “there was no real freedom” without economic security.

Police arresting pickets Edna Dixon and Lavinia Dock in a crowd, August 1917

Letter from Dock to the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine urging support for suffrage, 1908

British poster depicting the force-feeding of suffragists

Lavinia Dock

Lavinia Dock was a respected leader in nursing and lifelong suffragist. While studying at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1886, she joined other women who went to the polls on election day and attempted to cast their ballots. This was her first arrest for the cause.

Dock taught at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1890-1896, where she served as assistant superintendent of nurses and afterward remained a powerful influence on the alumnae community. Returning to New York to work at the Henry Street Settlement, she brought the perspective of poor and working-class women to suffrage circles often dominated by upper-class activists’ concerns.

“It is distressing to see nurses, who ardently desire reforms, refusing to acknowledge the virtue of democracy’s most potent instrument, the ballot.”

In her mid-50s, Dock led hundreds of suffragists on hikes from New York City to Albany and then from New York to Washington DC. She soon moved to Washington to focus on the all-out push for a constitutional amendment. On June 27, 1917, she was among the first silent sentinels arrested. She returned to the picket line, and in August was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five days in the Occoquan workhouse.

Dock went to jail again in 1918. She and her fellow inmates declared a hunger strike, a tactic that Alice Paul brought with her from England. The force-feeding of suffragists raised ethical objections from doctors and nurses; Dock had written a column condemning it in the American Journal of Nursing eighteen years earlier.

This letter to La Motte's close friend discusses leading Hopkins physician William Osler's anti-suffrage position. (Chesney Medical Archives).

Portrait circa 1910-1915. (Public Domain).

Postcard from La Motte to Gertrude Stein, 1913 (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

Ellen La Motte

Ellen La Motte was a 1902 graduate of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses. She soon became involved in the fight against tuberculosis, first with the Visiting Nurses Association, and then as Superintendent of the Tuberculosis Division of the Baltimore Health Department, a position newly-created by health reformers.

In addition to improving public health, La Motte sought a more equal society through political work. In the early 1910s, she led a suffrage parade and organized with the Just Government League in Baltimore. The more radical struggle for women's suffrage in England compelled her to leave her Health Department post and travel there. Soon after arriving, she wrote that she had already “been through four fights and one riot (and not always in the capacity of an innocent bystander).”

“The question is not whether one is afraid or not. It is what one does when one is afraid that counts.”

At the beginning of World War I, La Motte volunteered in a French military hospital. While in Paris, she became friends with the modernist writer Gertrude Stein, who influenced her literary style, and met Emily Crane Chadbourne, an art collector from Chicago who would become her life partner. Yet she felt compelled to witness the war firsthand, and served at battlefield hospitals on the Western Front from 1915 to 1916. Her vivid account of the horrors she witnessed, The Backwash of War, was banned in England and led to public outcry in the U.S. In addition to opposing war, La Motte considered herself politically a socialist and anarchist.

Traveling with Emily Chadbourne after the war, La Motte visited China and learned about the devastating impact of opium as a tool of colonial domination. She spent the rest of her career leading an international capaign against the "vast financial interests" that benefitted from the opium trade.