A Time for Courage: The Suffragette Diary of Kathleen Bowen, Washington, DC, 1917

American women started to fight for their rights on July 19, 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention — the official beginning of the organized women's movement in the United States. Before the women’s rights movement started, women could not go to college, and they could not work in most jobs. They could teach, sew, work in a factory, or work as a maid. Any money they earned belonged to their husbands. Of-course, women did not have the right to vote in any political election.

The organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention — Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann McClintock — thought that women deserved these rights, and they presented a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. Modeled after the American Declaration of Independence, they declared that all men and women are created equal and it demanded equal access to jobs and education and the right to vote.

One women’s group — the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) — worked at getting women the right to vote in each state. By 1900, women could vote in four states — Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming.

Another group wanted to pressure the President of the United States to change the national law to allow all women to vote in all states. This group was known as the radical National Woman's Party (NWP).. Founded in 1913 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the women in this group picketed the White House through the winter of 1917. At first they were tolerated, but after time, especially once the U.S. got involved in World War I, women started to get arrested. In the end, 168 women served jail sentences lasting up to six months for their protests. An appeals court later found the arrests and incarcerations "invalid."

To learn more, meet Women who Changed History.

Meet Kathleen Bowen

Kathleen’s mother was one of the women who picketed the White House that cold winter. Read about her hopes and fears.

July 17, 1917

I shall never be able to explain this calmly but I am determined to write about it. I want to set down the truth exactly. It is hard to think about the future at times like this, but someday many years from now I want people, maybe my own children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, to know the truth. To know how a court of law can become a court of unfairness and senseless punishment and make a joke of justice. Mother and Auntie Claire and Harriet’s mother were arrested with a dozen or more other women. It was Bastille Day, the day that celebrates the fall of the French Bastille and the French Revolution of 1789. They, along with the others, had marched that morning to the White House gates with banners inspired by that revolution, signs with the words LIBERTY, EQUALTIY, FRATERNITY. The police were very cunning. Some were on bicycles and some on foot and they would close in on one or two women at a time…. The charges were read and this very skinny, bony-faced man who was the prosecutor and reminded me of a dark bird of prey with his beaked nose and lick black hair began to painstakingly explain how these women obstructed traffic on the sidewalk while taking their banners to the White House Gates. One would have thought that they had trucks or immense wagons, whereas they were actually walking single file with the banner held high up and were not obstructing anything. But with his oily words, dramatic pauses, and sideways glances the prosecutor spun a web of lies.