Silent Sentinels

For the 1929 film, see Silent Sentinel (film).
Silent Sentinels picketing the White House

The Silent Sentinels, also known as the Sentinels of Liberty,[1][2][3] were a group of over 2,000 women in favor of women's suffrage organized by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, who nonviolently protested in front of the White House during Woodrow Wilson's presidency starting on January 10, 1917.[4] Nearly 500 were arrested, and 168 served jail time.[1][2][3] They were the first group to picket the White House.[1][3] Later, they also protested in Lafayette Square, not stopping until June 4, 1919 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed both by the House of Representatives and the Senate.[5]

The Sentinels started their protest after a meeting with the president on January 9, 1917, during which he told the women to "concert public opinion on behalf of women's suffrage."[6] The protesters served as a constant reminder to Wilson of his lack of support for suffrage. At first the picketers were tolerated, but they were later arrested on charges of obstructing traffic.

The name Silent Sentinels was given to the women because of their silent protesting, and had been coined by Harriot Stanton Blatch.[7] Using silence as a form of protest was a new principled, strategic, and rhetorical strategy within the national suffrage movement and within their own assortment of protest strategies.[6] Throughout this two and a half year long vigil, many of the women [8] who picketed were harassed, arrested, and unjustly treated by local and US authorities, including the torture and abuse inflicted on them before and during the November 14, 1917, Night of Terror.

  1. ^ a b c "The Woman Suffrage Timeline". The Liz Library. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  2. ^ a b "Woodrow Wilson: Women's Suffrage". PBS. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  3. ^ a b c "PSI Source: National Woman's Party". McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  4. ^ Stillion Southard, Belinda. The National Woman's Party and the Silent Sentinels. University of Maryland. pp. 144–145.
  5. ^ "Lafayette Park: First Amendment Rights on the President's Doorstep (Teaching with Historic Places) (U.S. National Park Service)". www.nps.gov. Retrieved 2024-09-21.
  6. ^ a b Stillion Southard, Belinda A. (2007). "Militancy, power, and identity: The Silent Sentinels as women fighting for political voice". Rhetoric & Public Affairs. 10 (3): 399–417. doi:10.1353/rap.2008.0003. JSTOR 41940153. S2CID 143290312.
  7. ^ Levin & Dodyk 2020, p. 44.
  8. ^ "Tactics and Techniques of the National Woman's Party Campaign". Library of Congress.