Women You May Not Know

Teacher and social worker Doris Stevens (1892-1963) organized for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and helped assemble the first convention of women voters at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (1914).

But it was Stevens’ work for the breakaway National Woman’s Party (NWP) that would make her a key figure in the enfranchisement of women. In its first year (1916), the NWP enjoyed modest public support, but when the U.S. entered World War I, suffragist agitations were deemed unpatriotic.

Stevens regarded fighting for democracy abroad while restricting it at home hypocritical; in 1917, 1,000 marchers sharing her view were barred from the White House, and she was sentenced to Occoquan Workhouse. Undaunted, Stevens used Woodrow Wilson’s “administrative terrorism” to the suffragists’ advantage; upon her release, she traveled cross-country publicizing her allies’ “martyrdom,” and in 1920, published Jailed for Freedom, a vivid chronicle of suffragist perseverance.

Stevens went on to back the Committee on International Action, the Equal Rights Amendment, and other feminist causes. She was the first woman member of the American Institute of Law (1931).

By Jen Hawkins