Women Suffrage Prisoners at Occoquan Workhouse (Historical Marker)

This historical marker was removed in 2015 when the park roadway was realigned and a new memorial built.


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Here follows the inscription written on this roadside historical marker:

Women Suffrage Prisoners at Occoquan Workhouse
Occoquan Regional Park

Adjacent to this park a group of women was imprisoned in 1917 for demanding the right to vote. The road to Occoquan Workhouse had started in 1848.

In July 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, officially opening the American women’s rights movement, a controversial resolution was adopted: “Resolved, which is the duty of women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton was able to get the resolution passed only with the help of Frederick Douglass, the former slave and famous abolitionist orator. For many years progress was slow and as late as 1913 women had full suffrage only in nine states and the territory of Alaska which had no presidential electors.

Marking a dramatic change in the polite crusade for votes for women, the National Woman’s Party, founded in 1916 by Alice Paul, adopted the strategy of holding the party in power responsible for the success or failure of woman suffrage. Attempting to persuade President Wilson and the Democratic Party to support actively the Susan B. Anthony amendment, first proposed in 1878, the National Woman’s Party began to picket the White House in 1917. Beginning in June 1917 scores of women were arrested, found guilty of unlawful assembly, sentenced to pay a fine of $25, or serve a term in jail. Preferring jail rather than paying what they considered to be unjust fines, the women were given sentences ranging from 30 to 60 days and in some instance 6 months. Some went to D.C. Jails the majority were sent to Occoquan Workhouse, now Lorton Reformatory, Lorton, Virginia.

Among those arrested were graduates of distinguished educational institutions, students, teachers, nurses, at least two physicians, a geologist, and a professor of history. The socially prominent included Lucy Ewing, niece of Adlai Stevenson, Vice President under Cleveland. The youngest arrested was 19 and the oldest to serve at Occoquan was 73. She found scrubbing floors almost beyond her strength.

The women had their mail withheld, were confronted with unwashed blankets, contaminated food, forced into prison dress and ordered to perform prison work. Protesting the poor treatment and general state of prison conditions, the women insisted they were political prisoners and should be treated accordingly. Some refused to work, were put in solitary confinement and given bread and water. Others, led by Lucy Burns of the Executive Committee of the National Woman’s Party, went on a hunger strike and were force-fed. As news of the extreme treatment given the suffrage prisoners began to emerge, public indignation and demands for an investigation of conditions finally forced their release late in 1917. Upon appeal, the sentences of the women imprisoned at Occoquan were reversed in 1918.

By August 26, 1920, the Susan B. Anthony amendment was ratified, ending a struggle for basic political rights that had lasted for 72 years. The woman suffrage prisoners at Occoquan had contributed significantly to that victory.

Sixty-five years after imprisonment, recognition was finally given these women. On March 6, 1982, under the leadership of Joseph T. Flakne and the auspices of the League of Women Voters of Fairfax, a handsome marker commemorating them was unveiled on route 123, near Youth Center No.2. The commonwealth of Virginia ratified the amendment giving women the right to vote in February 1952.

Evelyn L. Pugh
Professor of History
George Mason University

Sidebar under the right picture: Alice Paul designed the jail door pin as a symbol of appreciation for the women who had been imprisoned.

Erected by Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority.


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The marker is placed near the Occoquan Workhouse Beehive Brick Oven, which is what you see in the background of Picture 2, which convicts used to make the bricks used in constructing historic durable buildings throughout northern Virginia.

Jail Door Pin:
Alice Paul designed the jail door pin as a symbol of appreciation for the women who had been imprisoned.
This jail door pin belonged to Betsy Graves Reyneau. It is on display at Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, DC.


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Here follows an excerpt from the ThoughtCo website:

Brutal Treatment of Women Suffragists at Occoquan Workhouse
By Jone Johnson Lewis
Updated on October 17, 2019

An email has been circulating that tells of the brutal treatment in 1917 at Occoquan, Virginia, prison, of women who had picketed the White House as part of the campaign to win the vote for women. The point of the email: it took a lot of sacrifice to win the vote for women, and so women today should honor their sacrifice by taking our right to vote seriously, and actually getting to the polls. The author of the article in the email, though the emails usually omit the credit, is Connie Schultz of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland.

Alice Paul led the more radical wing of those who were working for women's suffrage in 1917. Paul had taken part in more militant suffrage activity in England, including hunger strikes that were met with imprisonment and brutal force-feeding methods. She believed that by bringing such militant tactics to America, the public's sympathy would be turned towards those who protested for woman suffrage, and the vote for women would be won, finally, after seven decades of activism.

And so, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others separated in America from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), headed by Carrie Chapman Catt, and formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) which in 1917 transformed itself into the National Woman's Party (NWP).

While many of the activists in the NAWSA turned during World War I either to pacifism or to support America's war effort, the National Woman's Party continued to focus on winning the vote for women. During wartime, they planned and carried out a campaign to picket the White House in Washington, DC. The reaction was, as in Britain, strong and swift: the arrest of the picketers and their imprisonment. Some were transferred to an abandoned workhouse located at Occoquan, Virginia. There, the women staged hunger strikes, and, as in Britain, were force-fed brutally and otherwise treated violently.

I've referred to this part of woman suffrage history in other articles, notably when describing the history of the suffragist split over strategy in the last decade of activism before the vote was finally won.

Feminist Sonia Pressman Fuentes documents this history in her article on Alice Paul. She includes this re-telling of the story of Occoquan Workhouse's "Night of Terror," November 15, 1917:

Under orders from W. H. Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.
(source: Barbara Leaming, Katherine Hepburn (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), 182.)


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Here follows an excerpt from the Northern Virginia History Notes website:

Women's Suffrage Movement Led to Occoquan Workhouse Imprisonment
by Debbie Robison

The Occoquan workhouse played a central role in the efforts, and ultimate success, of suffragettes seeking the right to vote. Lucy Burns, who with Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (which evolved into the National Woman’s Party), was an influential leader behind efforts to attract publicity to the woman’s suffrage movement. Beginning in January 1917, women from all over the United States picketed President Woodrow Wilson’s administration at the White House. Wilson believed that suffrage was state issue, not a national one.

The picketers, arrested by a reluctant police force, initially were released on their own recognizance, and later given short three-day sentences in the District jail. On July 14, 1917, sixteen upper-society women were arrested and sentenced to two months in the District workhouse at Occoquan. Militants, as the picketers were termed, continued to be arrested and sent to the workhouse (some with six-month sentences) through November 1917. Charges faced by the women included inciting unlawful assemblage and obstructing traffic. Two leaders of the National Woman’s Party, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, were imprisoned at the Occoquan workhouse. The courtroom was an opportunity for the suffragettes to speak out.

“As long as women have to go to jail for petty offenses to secure freedom for the women of America, then we will continue to go to jail.”

The imprisoned suffragettes were welcomed to the workhouse by Superintendent Whittaker, who felt they should be treated as any other prisoner. They wore gray one-piece dresses, ate standard prison fare, and were assigned to the sewing room and gardens to work. Whittaker announced that outside communications would be limited.

"Supt. Whittaker announced last night that there will be no visitors for the ladies and they will not be allowed to communicate with any one. They will be permitted to write to their relatives, subject to the jail censorship, and will be allowed to received letters from relatives, of course. If they desire a lawyer, he or she will be allowed to converse with them…"

Miss Lucy Burns visited the workhouse in August 1917 to investigate the lack of nourishment and poor food. Burns, finding that the women were much thinner and complaining of headaches due to poor and insufficient food, spoke in conference with Illinois Senator J. Hamilton Lewis. Lewis agreed to visit the workhouse to probe the charges.

Charges were filed against Whittaker by a committee of the National Woman’s party, headed by Miss Lucy Burns, accusing Whittaker of cruelty to prisoners. Malnutrition resulted in six women being hospitalized. Additionally, an affidavit charged Whittaker with permitting a prisoner to be chained to the walls in a cell of the workhouse. Pending an inquiry, Whittaker was relieved of his duties, but was later reinstated when he was exonerated.

The Board of Charities committee, in a report to commissioners stated:

"From the date of the commitment of the first of the several groups of the National Woman’s party to Occoquan a spirit of insubordination, of mischievous agitation and utter disregard of all rules and regulations has been exhibited by them.

This insubordination continued for eleven suffrage pickets who faced solitary confinement unless they rescind their “ultimatum” declaring that they will not work because they are “political prisoners.”

Led by Alice Paul and Miss Winslow, sixteen suffragettes began hunger strikes in mid-November. It was reported by National Women’s Party members that:

"Mrs. Lawrence Lewis…and Miss Lucy Burns…were removed from Occoquan to jail Tuesday, where they were forcibly fed, Miss Burns by means of a tube through the nose."

By the end of November 1917, sentences for the suffragettes required that they be sent to the Washington Asylum Jail instead of Occoquan. Some were illegally transferred to the workhouse, but were subsequently returned by court order. Eighteen lawsuits, totaling $1.2 M, were filed in December by picketers alleging insults, abuse, and false imprisonment. Supervisor Whittaker resigned three months later, and was replaced by Charles C. Foster.

On August 26, 1920, the 19th amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote.