Suffragists’ Night of Terror at the Occoquan Workhouse

In November 1917, guards at the Occoquan Workhouse assaulted and terrorized 33 women from the National Woman’s Party. They were serving sentences for charges like “obstructing sidewalk traffic” after peacefully protesting in front of the White House.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We have
got a few episodes in our podcast archive that connect

(00:21):
in some way to the movement for women's suffrage in
both the United States and the UK. One thing that's
come up a few times in those shows is violence
committed against the women who were protesting for the right
to vote, often at the hands of law enforcement. For example,
in our two partn on Sofia do Leap Sing, we
talked about a protest in London that came to be

(00:41):
known as Black Friday, and that's when about two hundred
protesters from the Women's Social and Political Union were assaulted
by police outside of Parliament. In the United States, we
have alluded to, but never directly discussed, a similarly infamous event,
and that was the Night of Terror, which was a
November nineteen seventeen incident in which the guards at Occoquan

(01:02):
workhouse assaulted and terrorized thirty three women from the National
Woman's Party. They were part of a group known as
the Silent Sentinels. They were serving sentences of up to
six months for charges like obstructing sidewalk traffic after peacefully
protesting in front of the White House. So we're gonna
start by tacking through a really quick recap of women's

(01:23):
suffrage organizations in the United States, because this whole story
grows out of a series of ideological splits that happened
within the movement. There were, of course, other suffrage organizations
besides the ones that were about to talk about, all
with their own goals and strategies, but these are the
ones that are directly connected to today's story. The Seneca

(01:44):
Falls Convention in eighty eight, which we've talked about before,
was the first dedicated convention for women's rights in the
United States, and at the time the idea of women
getting the right to vote was really pretty radical. The
resolution to add the right to vote to the conventions
Declaration of Sentiments passed by only a very narrow margin.

(02:04):
After the Seneca Falls Convention, women's rights leaders and organizers
continued to meet at national and local conventions for more
than a decade before the movement was put on hold
during the Civil War, and once the war was over,
women's rights leaders found common ground with people who were
trying to protect the rights of newly freed slaves and
other black citizens, and the result was the American Equal

(02:28):
Rights Association, formed in eighteen sixty six, which was dedicated
to pursuing equal rights for all citizens. This organization didn't
last though. Three years later, attendees at its annual meeting
disagreed over whether to support the fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
which had been passed by Congress and was awaiting ratification

(02:49):
by the States. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed voting rights without
regard to race or prior condition of servitude, but it
didn't have any mention of sex. The result of this
disagreement was a schism within the organization. Susan B. Anthony
and Elizabeth Katie Stanton launched the National Woman's Suffrage Association,

(03:09):
dedicated to fighting for voting rights only for women. Lucy Stone,
Julia Ward Howe and others who supported the Fifteenth Amendment
formed the American Woman's Suffrage Association. We talk about some
more of the details in our past podcast on all
of this and how that separation took place in our
episode about Frederick Douglas. Yeah, it's part of this long arc,

(03:31):
but we don't want to repeat all those details again here.
In eighteen ninety, after twenty one years of operating separately
from one another, the American Woman Suffrage Association and the
National Woman's Suffrage Association once again merged, forming the National
American Woman Suffrage Association or n a w s A.

(03:52):
There's some disagreement over whether to spell out the letters
or to say now is A. It's leaders included Lucy
Stone and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton, so
basically the leaders of the previous organizations that had combined,
and its purpose was once again to secure the right
to vote for women. This time, the strategy was to

(04:12):
start small and to get individual municipalities and states to
grant women the right to vote. According to this strategy,
getting enough state to state success would put pressure on
the federal government to pass nationwide legislation for women's suffrage.
And this brings us at last to the women directly
involved in today's episode. Even though it focused on winning

(04:34):
the vote state by state and not through Congress, the
n a w s A never disbanded its Congressional committee
and in ve Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were appointed
to be the committee's joint chairs. Both women had spent
some time in England and they've been involved with Emmiline
Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union that was

(04:56):
the more radical arm of the suffrage movement in Britain
who's members were the ones proudly reclaiming the derisive nickname
of suffragettes. Paul and Burns were directly familiar with WSPU
tactics like vandalism and hunger strikes, which were intended to
aggressively draw attention to the issue of women's rights and
to put pressure on the government for a solution. Paul

(05:19):
and Burns had actually met for the first time at
a police station in London after being arrested at a protest.
Paul Burns both wanted the n a w s A
to adopt at least some of the wsp USE tactics,
and they weren't at all content to allow the Congressional
Committee to languish as the organization focused on local and
state rather than national efforts. So they convinced the n

(05:42):
A w s A to organize an enormous protest parade,
the Woman's Suffrage Progression, to be held on March third,
nineteen thirteen, and to be accompanied by open air meetings
and speeches. This day was chosen for a specific reason.
It was the day before the inauguration of present in A.
Woodrow Wilson. The n a w s A was no

(06:03):
stranger to parades. Parades were a long standing part of
the organization's strategy, along with organizing conventions and meetings and
publishing literally hundreds of books and pamphlets. But the parade
was much bigger than anything that n a w s
A had arranged before, and it was also intended to
be a national event rather than a local or a
regional one. Between five thousand and eight thousand marchers were

(06:27):
involved in this parade, along with twenty floats, nine marching bands,
and four mounted brigades. It was to end with an
allegorical tableau outside the U. S. Treasury Building, in which
women who were dressed as liberty, justice, charity, peace and
hope would symbolically surround a central figure representing Columbia. Leading

(06:49):
the parade was activist and labor lawyer and as Milholland.
If that name rings a bell from from past podcasts,
She later married Eugen Boassavan, who remay and the St
Vincent Malay. After Maholland's death, I to b Wells. Barnett
also marched in the parade with the Illinois Contingent, refusing
to comply with the racial segregation that organizers were encouraging

(07:11):
for the participating groups. Other well known participants included Helen Keller,
Nellie Blygh, and Katherine Dexter McCormick. The parade started off well,
aside from a delay and getting started, but as it
moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, the street became completely blocked by
a huge crowd of spectators, most of the men who
had come to Washington for the inauguration. As the crowd

(07:34):
closed in on the marchers, they were trapped. In addition
to heckling, taunting, tripping, and even assaulting the marchers, the men,
who vastly outnumbered the women, blocked the parade route completely,
including trapping ambulances. In this log jam, more than a
hundred women were injured and had to be hospitalized. This

(07:56):
also completely took the crowd away from the train station
that was intended to meet the incoming president. So when
Woodrow Wilson got off his train and was like where
is everybody? People said they are all at the suffrage parade.
Police overwhelmingly did not intervene in this chaos. They didn't
really do anything to maintain crowd control, as the spectators

(08:18):
completely blocked the street. A cavalry union had to eventually
be dispatched from Fort Meyer to restore order. Police Chief
Richard Sylvester weathered heavy criticism over the handling of the march,
especially since there were no similar incidents on Inauguration Day
the next day. This led to a congressional investigation that
ultimately exonerated Sylvester of malicious intent towards the suffragists, while

(08:42):
also criticizing his lack of action on the day. Even
though he was ultimately dismissed as police chief, a lot
of people in the suffrage movement felt like the whole
incident had been whitewashed. Following the parade, the naw SA
was worried that Paul and Burns were simply too radical,
that their methods were too aggressive, and that they might
turn to the sorts of vandalism and property damage that

(09:03):
was becoming a hallmark of the movement's most radical wing
in the United Kingdom. So in nineteen thirteen, Paul and
Burns struck out on their own to form the Congressional
Union for Woman's Suffrage or see You. They remained involved
with the naws AS Congressional Committee for a time, but
their ideological differences ultimately led the two organizations to sever

(09:25):
all ties with one another. You hear over and over
again when reading about this that Paul and Burns were
just too radical, and I was expecting and doing the
research that I was going to find that they were
doing things like setting people's houses on fire, which was
happening in the in the UK. No, that was not
what was happening at all, which we're going to talk
about more in a minute. They were really not actions

(09:46):
that we would consider radical today. In nineteen sixteen, the
two women established the Woman's Party of Western Voters. Several
states in the West had already granted women the right
to vote, and this party encouraged the women who were
living in those states to vote for candidates who supported
women's rights in a national push for women's suffrage. This
included campaigning against Woodrow Wilson, since no progress had been

(10:10):
made towards getting women the right to vote during his
first term in office. Meanwhile, the CEU continued working towards
voting rights in the states where women still couldn't vote. Then,
in nineteen seventeen, the two groups merged to form the
National Woman's Party, or n w P. The Silent Sentinels
who were arrested in nineteen seventeen were part of the

(10:30):
n w P, And we're going to talk more about
that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
After Woodrow Wilson was elected to his second term as
president in nineteen sixteen, the National Women's Party decided to
put more direct pressure on the White House and Congress

(10:51):
to make some kind of progress forward national voting rights
for women. They became even more determined to do this
after having a meeting with the President on January nine,
nineteen and which he told NWP members to concert public
opinion on behalf of woman's suffrage. The next day, they
started a protest directly outside the White House that would

(11:13):
continue for months. In the n w p S Weekly Journal,
which was the suffragist Elizabeth Katie Stanton's daughter, Harriet Stanton Blanche,
described it this way, quote, we must go to him
every day. We must have a continuous delegation to the
President of the United States, if he is to realize
the never ceasing insistent demand of women that he take

(11:34):
action where he is responsible. We may not be admitted
within the doors, but we can at least stand at
the gates. We may not be allowed to raise our
voices and speak to the President, but we can address
him just the same because our message will be inscribed
upon the banners which we carry in our hands. Let
us post our silent sentinels at the gates of the

(11:54):
White House. And this was the protest that was viewed
extremely radical at the time, standing outside the White House
with banners silently Yea. Lucy Burns played a huge part
in this protest. She was often the one leading the
pickets who silently demonstrated outside the White House every day,

(12:15):
no matter what the weather, sometimes enduring illness and frost
bite in the process. For the sake of both publicity
and trying to draw more women into the movement, the
protests sometimes had them days, such as a particular College
Day or Working Women Day. That one was actually held
on Sunday so the women protesting could do it without
losing a day's pay. At first, the President tolerated their

(12:39):
presence there in front of the White House. On the
way in or out of the White House, he would
smile and tip his hat, and on particularly cold days,
he would invite them in for tea. Although they consistently
turned down that invitation, and although passers by often heckled
the Silent Sentinels, the protest got a mixed but overall
not violent reaction from the general public in its early months.

(13:01):
All of this changed when the United States entered World
War One on April six, after which point the Silent
Sentinels and started encountering more and more resistance to their
picket outside the White House. Many people already felt like
their place was at home, not picketing on the sidewalk.
They're also calls for national unity in the face of
the United States involvement in the war, and a growing

(13:23):
sense that it was just not the time for women
to be focused on their own voting rights rather than
other national concerns. Passers by started more aggressively harassing the
women that were protesting, and the President eventually lost his
patients as well. He had previously told the DC police
to leave the women alone as long as they weren't

(13:44):
blocking the sidewalk, but he finally rescinded that instruction, and
the first wave of arrests took place on June twenty two,
nineteen seventeen. That day, Wilson wrote a letter to his
daughter in which he said that the suffragists were quote
bent on making their cause as obnoxious as possible once
again by standing outside the White House with signs silently

(14:06):
it silently between. Then in November of nine hundreds of women,
including women from at least twenty six different states, were
arrested and charged with obstructing sidewalk traffic, unlawful assembly, or
the nebulous violating an ordinance. Also, there are lots of
pictures of this protest, and they really consistently show the

(14:27):
women who were protesting either walking in a single file
line or standing single file, either right up against or
right in front of the White House. Spence, they were
definitely not obstructing the sidewalk. Although the Espionage Act had
been passed in part to try to cut down on
anti war protests, and it could have been applied to

(14:48):
the suffrage demonstrations as well. The women often carried large
banners emblazoned with quotes from the president's speeches about freedom
and democracy. The administration was smart enough to know that
it would not look good to use the Espionage Act
to prosecute women who were carrying banners that were bearing
the president's own words. So by July, after the the

(15:11):
arrests had been going on for a couple of weeks,
the President had started to consider the whole protests to
be an embarrassment, especially since several prominent women were now
in jail for it. So he pardoned all of the
suffragists who had been incarcerated. At first they refused to
accept his pardon, but then they did, and then they
went right back to picketing at the White House. As

(15:33):
the protest went on, the banners the women were carrying
became more and more provocative. One red kaiser Wilson, have
you forgotten your sympathy for the Germans because they were
not self governed? Twenty million American women are not self governed.
Take the beam out of your own eye. Another read

(15:53):
to the envoys of Russia. President Wilson and Envoy Root
are deceiving Russia. They say, we are in democracy. Help
us win a world war so that democracies may survive.
We the women of America, tell you America is not
a democracy twin see, million American women are denied the
right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of

(16:14):
their national enfranchisement. Help us make this nation really free.
Tell our government that it must liberate its people before
it can claim free Russia as an ally. As an asside,
that is a lot of words to put on banners.
They were very large banners. Yes, I have seen them,
and I'm always sort of amazed that they managed to

(16:35):
get all of that on there. But just in case
people were wondering, yes, all of those words were on banners. Uh.
These banners particularly outraged members of the military, some of
whom began harassing and even even assaulting the suffragists as
well as destroying their banners. Police did little to intervene
other than arresting the picketers themselves. In October, DC police

(16:59):
and is that anyone arrested for protesting outside the White
House would be sentenced to six months in prison for
obstructing the sidewalk, when normally if anyone was obstructing the sidewalk,
it was the people protesting that are people heckling them,
not the protesters themselves. But they brought those hecklers to

(17:22):
the sidewalk is the logic that probably got used at
the time. Nevertheless, they persisted, with Alice Paul leading the
picket line from the NWP headquarters to the White House itself.
The very next day after that announcement was made, carrying
a banner that said, the time has come to conquer
or submit, For there is but one choice. We have

(17:43):
made it as promised, they were once again arrested, convicted,
and imprisoned. As this cycle of arrests and incarcerations wore on,
law enforcement tried a new approach, making the whole process
so unpleasant and humiliating that perhaps the women would just
give up. Conditions were poor at every prison and workhouse

(18:03):
in the area, but at Acoquan Workhouse they were particularly bad.
Silent sentinels started being transferred to the workhouse from the
more commonly used district jail. At the workhouse, their personal possessions,
including toiletries, toothbrushes, and columbs, were confiscated, and they weren't
given any kind of replacements apart from one single bar

(18:23):
of soap that was shared by everyone in the dormitory.
Most of the suffragists were actually afraid to use this
communal bar of soap due to the risk of spreading disease.
The women who were typically incarcerated at the workhouse had
very little medical care, and some of them had active
infections of diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis. The food was

(18:44):
largely inedible and infested with worms, dead flies, and mouse droppings.
Usually the only water available was in an open bucket
that was shared by everyone. Betting was so filthy that
the matrons who had to handle it during inspections and
searches did so wearing gloves, although these women were still
expected to sleep on it. The suffragists were also denied exercise,

(19:07):
reading and writing materials legal counsel and visitors. Prison authorities
also tried to make the silent sentinels uncomfortable by using
racism as a wedge. They integrated the dormitory where the
suffragists slept. This was obviously during the gym crow era. Still,
they arranged the beds so that they alternated with a

(19:29):
white suffragist in one bed and then a black woman,
who was often serving a sentence for prostitution, in the
next bed. They also assigned some of the suffragist the
job of repainting the quote colored restrooms. Meanwhile, many of
the suffragists tried to make the argument that they should
be treated as political prisoners and not common criminals. They

(19:50):
tried to advocate for better conditions, sometimes for themselves and
sometimes for the workhouse population as a whole. Suffragists who
made a fuss were punished for it. At least one
matron was fired allegedly for treating the incarcerated suffragists kindly.
As all of this stretched on, several of the suffragists
turned to a tactic that had already been in use

(20:12):
in the British movement for women's suffrage, which was hunger strikes.
And as it happened in the UK, prison officials are
turning to force beating them, which was a painful, embarrassing
and dangerous process. Although some people were for sped in
the workhouse, Alice Paul was actually transferred to the psychotic
ward of the district jail and then for sped there

(20:33):
three times a day. On the night of November fourteenth,
nineteen seventeen, conditions at Occoquan Workhouse got much worse. A
group of women had been sent there after being arrested
on the tenth many of them for at least the
second time, Accoquan Superintendent William H. Whittaker told the facilities
guards to teach the women a lesson. They were physically

(20:56):
dragged from the dormitory and other common areas to quote
punishment cells and beaten. Many of them left manacled or
handcuffed overnight and threatened with being gagged and straight jacketed
and unice. Dana Brandon's account quote, I firmly believe that,
no matter how we behave, Whittaker was determined to attack

(21:17):
us as part of the government's plans to suppress the picketing.
There were six to ten guards in the room, others
collected on the porch forty to fifty, and all these
in with Whittaker when he first entered. Instantly the horror,
the furniture was a returned, and the room was a
scene of havoc. Whittaker, in the center of the room
directed the whole attack, inciting the guards to every brutality.

(21:40):
In the account of Mary Nolan, aged seventy three, quote,
I saw Dorothy Day brought in. The two men handling
her were twisting her arms above her head. Then suddenly
they lifted her up and banged her down over the
arm of an iron bench twice. Nolan's account continues, at
the end of the corridor, they pushed me through a door,

(22:00):
then I lost my balance and fell against the iron bed.
Mrs Cosu struck the wall. Then they threw two mats
in and two dirty blankets. She continues a little bit
later in her account, quote, we had lain there a
few minutes, trying to get our breath when Mrs Lewis
doubled over and handled like a sack of something was
thrown in her head, struck the iron bed. We thought

(22:23):
she was dead. She didn't move. We were crying over
her when we lifted her to the pad on my bed.
Mrs Coasu had a heart attack that night, which her
cellmates believed was brought on by the horror of thinking
that Mrs Lewis was dead, and the guards refused to
send a doctor. By this point, the Silent Sentinels had
legal counsel working outside the prison to secure their release.

(22:46):
This included Dudley Field Malone, who had run Wilson's reelection
campaign in California and had been Collector of the Port
of New York before resigning in protest over the suffrage issue,
and as they heard of the events of the night
of the fourteenth, Malone and other lawyers obtained a writ
of habeas corpus ordering that the incarcerated women be brought

(23:06):
to court. At first, Superintendent Whittaker tried to hide out
in his home to avoid being served with the writ.
When the suffrages finally appeared in court on November twenty three,
a lot of them had to be carried in on stretchers.
After their court appearance, a few of the women who
were in the worst condition were paroled, and the rest
were sent to the district jail, where the entire group

(23:28):
decided to go on a hunger strike together. The District
of Columbia couldn't afford to for speed so many of them,
and that, combined with the ongoing legal action, led to
their release over November. And we're gonna talk about what
happened after they were released, but first we are gonna
all take a little break in here from one of
our sponsors. This ongoing cycle of demonstrations and arrests and

(23:57):
imprisonments had roused some public sympathy for the Silent Sentinels,
especially since several of the women involved were the wives
or daughters of prominent men. This was even more true
as the words started to spread of conditions at both
the workhouse and the district jail. Photographs of recently released
women wrapped in blankets and clearly traumatized on their way

(24:18):
out of the facilities played a role in garnering sympathy
as well. Eventually, a district court ruled that their arrests
had not been justified in the first place and ordered
the District of Columbia to pay all the court costs.
Superintendent Whittaker and Louis zincom Warden of the District Jail
were both suspended and later fired. All of the high

(24:40):
profile arrests and the incidents that had happened while the
women were incarcerated really started to make suffrage a moral
issue for President Woodrow Wilson, and running into tandem with
the women from the n WP being arrested and incarcerated
and having a whole high profile horror behind bars. Then
National American Women Women's Suffrage Association had also framed itself

(25:04):
as a patriotic organization supporting the war effort, while also
diplomatically making a case that the United States making the
world safe for democracy included enfranchising all of its own
citizens at home, not just the male ones. So with
pressure coming from multiple directions, in January of nineteen eighteen,
after years of being coy and evasive at best, Woodrow

(25:27):
Wilson publicly announced his support for the constitutional Amendment for
women's suffrage that had been introduced all the way back
in eighteen seventy eight and failed every time it had
come up for vote. Even with the president's support, though,
it still didn't have enough congressional support to pass in
both houses of Congress in nineteen eighteen, So the n

(25:49):
w P kept on with its protests, still getting arrested
in cycles. Throughout all of this, they started lighting what
they called watch fires of Freedom outside of public buildings.
These were urns in which they set fire to the
texts of Wilson's speeches that related to freedom and democracy.
They also embarked on a cross country speaking tour in

(26:09):
prison garb called the Prison Special. As I mentioned earlier,
they kept being arrested, and they kept being incarcerated, but
there wasn't another incident as traumatic as the Night of Terror. Finally,
after a nineteen eighteen election cycle in which the n
A w s A, the n w P, and other
organizations had aggressively campaigned for candidates who would support the amendment.

(26:33):
The House of Representatives passed it in May of nineteen
nineteen in the Senate followed in June. From there, the
Nineteenth of Men meant needed to be ratified by thirty
six of the then forty eight states. The NWP and
other women's rights organizations kept up with their advocacy all
through the rest of nineteen nineteen and into nineteen twenty.

(26:53):
A ratification flag hung at the n WP headquarters, with
a new star sewn on each time a state ratified
the amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment finally got enough support from
the states when Tennessee ratified it on August eighteenth nine.
It was signed into law on August, and with that,
the n w P turned their focus to an equal

(27:14):
rights amendment. The n A W s A eventually evolved
into the League of Women Voters. The Equal Rights Amendment
could be a whole other podcast. So when we talk
about the nineteenth Amendment, a lot of times we hear
it as and then women had the right to vote.
But the n a W s A and the nwp's
work throughout this whole period was overwhelmingly by and about

(27:36):
white women. Both organizations were really fearful of losing the
support of Southern white women and of Southern legislators in general,
so whenever the subject of race came up, they mostly
worked to appease Jim Crow attitudes rather than actually working
for the right to vote for all women. And the
MWPS more radical tactics, which really were standing outside the

(27:59):
White House until you got rested. At this point, they
really effectively excluded black women. A strategy that included picketing
outside the White House and being arrested and incarcerated over
and over was inherently far riskier for black women than
for white women. Similarly, the ultimate effects of the Nineteenth
Amendment were focused on white women. When the Nineteenth Amendment

(28:21):
was signed into law, it combined with the fifteenth Amendment
to give all citizens the right to vote, regardless of sex, race, color,
or previous condition of servitude. Both amendments were extremely straightforward
on this point, with almost identical language beginning quote the
right of citizens of the United States to vote shall
not be denied or bridged by the United States or

(28:42):
by any State on account of and then the Nineteenth
Amendment ends that sentence with sex. The Fifteenth Amendment ends
it with race, color, or previous conditioners of servitude, but
in practice, in the decades following the ratification of the
Fifteenth Amendment after the end of the Civil War, many
states had passed laws that made no reference directly to race,

(29:04):
but they selectively made it a lot harder for people
of color, particularly black people, to vote. Poll taxes disproportionately
affected the black population, who were often among the nation's
poorest citizens, especially since centuries of enslavement meant that many
black families had been prevented from earning any money. Impossible
to pass literacy tests were subjectively graded by white government officials,

(29:29):
and in many states were only required of those whose
grandfathers had not been registered to vote. Since most black
citizens grandfathers had not been allowed to vote, this meant
that only black citizens had to take this impossible test,
and outside the realm of law, white supremacist organizations like
the Ku Klux Klan actively intimidated, threatened, harassed, and even

(29:51):
murdered people to keep black citizens from voting. So, even
though the letter of the nineteenth Amendment gave all women
the right to vote, and it's often celebrated as all
women getting the right to vote, and practice, Black women
were overwhelmingly excluded from actually exercising that right. Even after
the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, discriminatory laws that don't

(30:14):
specifically mentioned race, but disproportionately affect minorities, particularly black people,
continue to be an issue in the United States, such
the Night of Terror and it's aftermath. This is actually
why sometimes on the Internet there is this picture of
a bunch of women in bathing suits. They're actually eating pie,

(30:36):
But this the caption that circulates with this picture all
the time is that it's women in their bathing suits
eating pizza during the suffrage movement to annoy men, right,
And it outrages me every time I see it, because
the suffrage movement was not a pizza party, and it
was not done to annoy men. It was done at
a lot of personal cost to the women involved with

(30:57):
it to get women the right of vote. It's actually
a picture of a pie eating contest that happened like
way late. It was not any kind of early suffrage thing.
It was like way late in the whole movement had
nothing to do with its painting contests. So every time
I see it, that's one of those things that's always
been so weird to me in that like someone there's

(31:20):
some genesis point where they looked at that picture and said,
you know what, I'm gonna completely lie about what this is,
Like what was their goal? I don't know, but you
know I have I have an overall rule about correcting
people on the Internet, and and it's only to correct
people if you're preventing embarrassment and or preventing harm. And

(31:40):
I will correct people on that picture because I think
it's harmful to spread the idea that the suffrage movement
was like a whimsical fun party time right embarked upon
to annoy men like like it was a fun little
activity for some ladies. It was not remotely. Do you

(32:03):
have um pie eating contest? Listener mail, It's not contest,
but it is a less violence, uh topic than then.
This story has been today. Um. This is from Sarah
and it came in recently about our episode about Theodosja
Burr Alston and it says the title is another Theodoja

(32:25):
burt story. Uh. And Sarah says she's been a fan
of the show for many years, and she learned this
story on vacation in the Outer Banks. We did a
ghost tour in Manio on Roanoke Island, and Theodoja's was
one of the stories we heard. This is definitely a
highly unlikely story, told in colorful, embellish detailed by our guide,
who was quite a character himself, but it's interesting and

(32:47):
I'm paraphrasing his telling here. The patriot was taking by
pirates off the coast of Nag's Head, and it was
extremely violent and traumatic for the passengers. Left alive to
be ransomed, Theodosia became history. Racle direct quote. Pirates are
very superstitious by nature, and the one thing that terrifies
them as a crazy woman. It's bad luck to have
one on your ship. So they put her ashore near

(33:09):
Nag's Head and left her there. She carried her portrait
with her. She was found on a beach by a banker,
our first time hearing that term too, and he brought
her home to his wife. She was physically ill and
so traumatized by the events of the voyage that she
had amnesia, but she couldn't tell them anything about herself
or even her name. She remained living with the family
and Nag's head, keeping the portrait hanging near her bed,

(33:31):
never able to recall her earlier life, many years went by,
until finally, in eighteen sixty nine, Theodosia was very ill
and the family called a doctor for her. The doctor
cared for her as she passed away in the family,
who didn't have any money, asked him if he'd be
willing to accept something of value from their home in
lieu of payment. He took the portrait. Ever since then,
Theodosia is said to wander the beach looking for her

(33:54):
lost portrait. Of course, the timeline here is pretty far fetched.
Theodosia would have lived to be eighty six years old
in the scenario, extremely unlikely given her health problems. My
sister and I did a bunch of reading up on
the story and came across the various versions you mentioned
in the show. I just wanted to share one more
with you. Thank you so much for the show. We
love it, Sarah. Thank you for this story. Sarah. That

(34:15):
is deed pretty far fetched, and it does sound so
much like a story that you would hear on like
a a coastal historical tour. I went on one of
Charleston one time, and I had a tour guide who
was He was such a character, and he was so
funny and so knowledgeable, and also he would say things

(34:37):
and I would kind of go, I'm not sure if
that's legit. So anyway, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, where at
History podcast at how stepworks dot com. We're also at
missed in History all across our social media and if
you come to our website, which is missed in History

(34:58):
dot com, you will find show No. It's for all
the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on together,
and a searchable archive of every episode ever. So come
and see us at missed in History dot com