CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jailed for Freedom

ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in December 1917, several thousand women filled the Belasco Theater in Washington, DC for a mass meeting organized by the National Woman’s Party. The event was planned to honor the “self-respecting and patriotic American women” who had picketed the White House and served time in jail that summer and fall, including Alice Paul, who had recently been released after five weeks in prison. Alva Belmont, the NWP chair, set the charged tone of the gathering with these opening words: “A flame of rebellion is abroad among women, and the stupidity and brutality of the government in this revolt have only served to increase its heat.”¹

At the climax of the meeting, the eighty-nine women to be honored, all dressed in suffrage white, marched to the stage where they were presented with a specially designed brooch in the shape of the locked door of a prison cell. Said Elizabeth Thatcher Kent, herself a veteran of the picket line, as she gifted each former prisoner with a small (1-by-1½-inch) metal pin: “In honoring these women who were willing to go to jail for liberty we are showing our love of country and devotion to democracy.” The audience was so moved by the spectacle that it quickly pledged almost $100,000 to continue the campaign.²

Alice Paul drew inspiration for the NWP prison pin from several sources. The main one was Sylvia Pankhurst’s “Holloway Brooch,” which was distributed to members of the British Women’s Social and Political Union who had been jailed for the cause, including Alice Paul, who had been incarcerated three times in 1909 during her stay in England. Paul may also have remembered the Daughters of the American Revolution pin worn by the NWP activist Helen Hill Weed, which had bars representing her fourteen ancestors who died in the revolutionary conflict. No matter what the inspiration, these metal brooches became treasured mementoes of membership in an incredibly select society. Many of the former pickets wore them for the rest of their lives.³

In the 1940s, the long-time National Woman’s Party member Betsy Graves Reyneau showed her pin to the Howard Law School student Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist and feminist who later developed the “Jane Crow” legal strategy linking race and sex discrimination. Murray was profoundly moved both by the artifact and by the story behind it. When Reyneau died in 1964, her daughter gave the pin to Murray, for whom it became “one of my most cherished possessions” as well as a literal link to the generations of feminist activists who preceded her.⁴

ALMOST FIVE HUNDRED women were arrested on the suffrage picket lines between 1917 and 1919, and close to 170 served time in prison. These militant suffragists were so committed to the cause that they voluntarily risked their reputations and possibly their lives to secure women’s right to vote. Some, like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, were legendary in suffrage circles and have dominated suffrage histories ever since, but most, like Hazel Hunkins (later Hunkins-Hallinan), remain footnotes to history. Hunkins-Hallinan is not included in standard biographical dictionaries such as Notable American Women or American National Biography and has only a stub for a Wikipedia entry, but her life demonstrates the courage and commitment suffragists brought to what, in their eyes, was the most burning issue of their day.

Prison pin, National Woman’s Party. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Hazel Hunkins was born on June 6, 1890 in Aspen, Colorado and was brought up in Billings, Montana. The only child of Anna Whittingham and Lewis Hunkins, a jeweler and watchmaker, she later joked that the Revolutionary War lived on in her family because her father was “a die-hard Puritan from New England and my mother was English.” Despite not having a brother, she was aware from an early age that boys and girls were raised with different expectations based on gender. When she announced that she planned to become a doctor, her father replied that only men could be doctors. Instead, he told her, she could become a nurse.⁵

After she graduated from high school in Billings in 1908, her family sent her east for a year of college preparatory classes at the Mount Ida School in Newton, Massachusetts. She then enrolled at Vassar College, where she spent four glorious years taking every course offered in chemistry and graduated with that major in 1913. She began working towards a Master’s degree at the University of Missouri, focusing on agricultural economics, but found her career aspirations increasingly stymied because of her gender. Then suddenly, she was summoned home to nurse her sick mother. What Jane Addams called “the family claim”—the propensity to regard daughters as dependent possessions rather than as autonomous individuals in their own right—still held sway in 1916.

After her exciting time at Vassar and the University of Missouri, coming home to Billings was a huge letdown. When the principal of her high school asked if she was interested in joining the science department, she leapt at the chance of teaching chemistry again, only to be told that she would be expected to teach geography and botany, subjects she knew nothing about, because only men taught chemistry. Bored by her familial domestic duties as her mother’s health mended, she experienced “a summer of despair and unhappiness.” She claimed that she wrote to every chemistry laboratory from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, but the replies were all the same: we don’t hire women.⁶

At that low point, she was introduced to Anna Louise Rowe, whom Alice Paul had sent to Billings to establish a Montana branch of the National Woman’s Party. “For the first time in my life I heard the full philosophy of feminism described and explained to me. And I bought it—hook, line and sinker.” Not all suffrage epiphanies were so complete or quick, but for twenty-six-year-old Hazel Hunkins, her conversion literally changed her life. She threw herself into NWP activities, organizing a Billings branch and then becoming Montana state chair. From there she became a paid organizer, traveling to California, Colorado, Utah, and New York to work in various NWP campaigns. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, when flying was still a dangerous novelty, Hunkins dropped suffrage leaflets on the crowd from an airplane.⁷

Described as “young, beautiful and brilliant,” Hunkins proved to be a very persuasive organizer and soon was ensconced in Washington, DC overseeing the fieldwork of organizers sent out to the states. At NWP headquarters, Hazel quickly fell under the sway of the organization’s brilliant young leader. “After a talk with Alice Paul about what had to be done, one left her presence twice one’s size and ready to do anything for a cause she made you feel so deeply.” Like so many others, Hunkins recognized Paul as nothing less than a great leader. “Within her spirit was a flame forcing her to make right what she thought to be wrong to her sex and she communicated this in full strength to others.”⁸

Hunkins arrived in Washington, DC just as Alice Paul escalated her battle to force President Woodrow Wilson to endorse woman suffrage by posting “Silent Sentinels” at the White House gates. Picketing the White House is now such a staple of political life that it is often forgotten that the suffragists were the first ever to use this tactic at that symbolic location. With banners like “Mr. President! How Long Will Women Have to Wait for Their Freedom?” and “Democracy Should Begin at Home” the first pickets took their places on January 10, 1917, with Hazel Hunkins proving one of the most loyal and dedicated.

Taking a shift as a sentinel was much harder work than it might appear. The pickets stood outside no matter what the weather, feet frozen and hands numb from holding the heavy banners, subject to taunts from young boys and bemused stares from passersby. Luckily those reactions were balanced by heartening encouragement from supporters: “I just couldn’t go by without shaking hands with you splendid women!” gushed a woman with a small baby. When the “militant suffs” were pointed out to one man, he said with surprise, “Why, they don’t look so bad.” As Hunkins summed it up for a reporter for the Washington Post, “In a day’s work we meet them all, rich and poor, men and women of all classes and from every rank of life.… After all is said and done, we enjoy the experience, and being firm in our convictions of the justice of our cause, we are happy in whatever sacrifices we make in standing the cold or the fatigue of long vigils.”⁹

National Woman’s Party members representing colleges as diverse as Vassar and the University of Missouri picket the White House in February 1917. Their banners starkly call out President Woodrow Wilson for his failure to rally the country behind woman suffrage—a decidedly unladylike attack on the country’s highest elected official. Courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-31799.

For the first six months of 1917, NWP pickets literally “stood up” to President Woodrow Wilson as he came and went through the gates of the White House, making their case rhetorically with an ever-changing array of banners. “If we had given out a long, scholastic dissertation on the political status of women in this country,” Paul realized, “nobody would have paid any attention to it” but with the banners “the people were knocked into thinking.” (“I think we made millionaires out of those banner makers,” Hunkins later joked.) To maintain interest and break the monotony, Alice Paul organized days that featured picketers from specific states, alumnae of colleges and universities (only women were allowed to picket), and all-nurses or all-teachers days. The protestors’ task grew more fraught after April, when the United States entered World War I and the NWP refused to give up its suffrage advocacy. Even so, the picketers incited mainly curiosity, never violence, and the police did not interfere with their right to assemble. That changed in June with the so-called “Russian banners,” which provocatively, some said treasonously, linked Wilson’s war aims with the Russian Revolution.¹⁰

Things got ugly very fast. An angry passerby tore a banner from the hands of a Silent Sentinel—the first violent confrontation after six months of peaceful protest. Then a second banner was destroyed. When Hazel Hunkins came back on line the next day, with a fairly innocuous banner that read “We demand democracy and self government in our own land,” she was suddenly rushed by a woman who took hold of the banner and spit on it. “One minute I was standing there in perfect peace and quiet holding a banner that has had its duplicate in every fight that has ever been made for political rights; three minutes later I was holding a broken staff with no banner and the center of a surging crowd.” Because the sentinels were pledged to nonviolent resistance, Hunkins could not fight back, even when the crowd pressed toward her. “I never felt so alone and so helpless in my life,” she said. She then admitted tellingly, “I never felt so superior before and I never expect to again.”¹¹

A corner had been turned. After the Russian banner incident, the local police, apparently with the tacit support of the Wilson administration, started arresting and jailing picketers for disorderly conduct and obstructing sidewalk traffic, even though they were doing nothing differently than they had for the past six months. These pickets became the first American women to be jailed for the “crime” of advocating women’s rights. They were also among the first victims of wartime repression of dissent.

Undaunted, Alice Paul raised the stakes, planning large demonstrations for the Fourth of July and Bastille Day. Hazel Hunkins was arrested for the first time at the Fourth of July demonstration. She was selling copies of The Suffragist outside the Belasco Theater when a man stole her banner, which she demanded he return because it was NWP property. This altercation led to her arrest for disturbing the peace. She was not officially charged and did not go to jail, but other suffragists did.

As brave as Hazel Hunkins was on the picket line, she cowered at the thought of telling her mother back home in Billings what was going on, especially once the newspapers picked up the story of her arrest. Like countless other cross-generational dialogues between bold daughters and their cautious mothers—Alice Paul exchanged strikingly similar messages with her mother when she was imprisoned and force-fed in England in 1909—Hazel Hunkins tried to make the case for her actions to a doubting mother. “How can I ever make you see these things as I do.… Every minute has been darkened by the thought of what you were suffering.… I can imagine you walking up town and feeling that every eye is on you as the mother of a notorious character.” The telegrams she received from her mother left her in tears and wanting to catch the next train home. And yet she wrote her mother, “I am in some what the same position as a soldier in the trenches who has the choice of going back or of going on—and he chooses to go on.” Not at all sure she had made her case, all she could say was “try to be with me in spirit even when it is easiest to condemn.”¹²

Hazel Hunkins continued to serve on the picket lines over the coming months, risking arrest but never going to jail. Other suffragists were not so lucky. By October 1917, seventy women were imprisoned, six of them for terms as long as six months. Sent to serve their sentences at the Occoquan Work House, they were subjected to inedible food, humiliating treatment, lack of communication with the outside world, and—especially on the infamous “Night of Terror” on November 15, 1917—physical intimidation and violence from prison authorities. Doris Stevens pointedly labeled these reprisals “Administration Terrorism.”¹³

Alice Paul was then serving a seven-month sentence for obstructing traffic. When her demand for political prisoner status was refused, she and other suffragists began a hunger strike. Removed to the psychiatric ward, she was then forcibly fed three times a day for more than three weeks. Among her few visitors was Cora Smith Eaton King, her personal physician.

The administration had hoped to cripple suffrage activism with long prison sentences and mandatory forced feeding, but that strategy backfired. With so many suffragists serving time and close to thirty on hunger strikes, the authorities faced the real possibility that a suffragist would die on their watch. From that point on, sentences were kept deliberately short. Reflecting this change in policy, Alice Paul, now a genuine martyr to the cause, was abruptly released in late November after serving only five weeks of her sentence.

Throughout these months of picketing, Hazel Hunkins managed to stay out of jail. By then, she had taken a position as a researcher with the National War Labor Board, a temporary agency tasked with investigating labor issues in wartime. She loved her job, but she still remained deeply involved with the National Woman’s Party. “It is huge fun working for them when it is volunteer work,” she told her mother. “I don’t feel the slave to them that I did when I worked for them for a salary.”¹⁴

In the summer of 1918, with the Senate about to adjourn without considering the suffrage amendment, the NWP called a protest. It would be held on August sixth, the birthday of Inez Milholland, the movement’s first true martyr, who had collapsed and died of acute nephritis while on the campaign trail in November 1916 at age thirty. Of course Hazel Hunkins would be there, even though it was a Tuesday and she must have taken time off from work.

The demonstration was set for Lafayette Square, a public space directly across from the White House dominated by a large statue of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution. Doris Stevens recreated the scene: Women “dressed in white, hatless and coatless in the midsummer heat of Washington, marched to the monument carrying banners of purple, white and gold, led by a standard bearer carrying the American flag.” That standard bearer was Hazel Hunkins. “They made a beautiful mass of color as they grouped themselves around the statue” in an entirely peaceful protest. But when Dora Lewis of Philadelphia stepped forward to speak, she was “roughly seized by a policeman and placed under arrest.” Hazel was the next speaker, but she got no further than, “Here at the statue of Lafayette, who fought for the liberty of this country, and under the American flag, I am asking for—” before she was arrested. As speaker after speaker came forward, each met the same fate. According to one newspaper account, Woodrow Wilson exited the White House at the height of the arrests, glanced across the street, and smiled.¹⁵

The protestors were transported in police wagons to the booking station and ordered to appear in court the next week. Free on bail, Hazel Hunkins and others defiantly returned to Lafayette Square, where they were arrested several times over the next few days. The outcome of the trial was never in doubt. For the crimes of “holding a meeting in public grounds” and “climbing on a statue,” they were given sentences of between ten and fifteen days. Elsie Hill injected a rare moment of levity into the otherwise grim proceedings when she observed, “During my years of suffrage work I’ve been told and re-told that woman’s place is on a pedestal; and the first time I get on one, I’m arrested.” Hazel Hunkins put her best face forward when she cabled home, “TWENTY SIX OF AMERICAS FINEST WOMEN ARE ACCOMPANYING ME TO JAIL ITS SPLENDID DONT WORRY LOVE HAZEL.”¹⁶

The prisoners were sent not to the Occoquan Workhouse, the site of all previous incarcerations, but to an abandoned jail building in the swampy District prison grounds. Hazel Hunkins’s account for The Suffragist described the ordeal in sparse, straightforward prose: “In a moment we were on the other side of the iron gate and the clang of the great lock meant we were prisoners held by our government for daring to proclaim it cannot yet hold high the torch of liberty while millions of its adult citizens are still denied a voice in the power that rules them.” Conditions were so bad that, save for two elderly women, all the protestors immediately began a hunger strike to protest their treatment. Prisoners dragged the straw pallets from their cells to the cement floor of the yard, where they huddled together to fight off the cold and tried to keep up their spirits by singing songs, including an energetic “Happy Birthday” to Helen Hill Weed who turned forty-three on the second day.¹⁷

By then the most acute pangs of hunger passed, but the women soon became violently ill with something more ominous than the usual symptoms of a hunger strike: “The horrible smells coming from the antiquated sanitary arrangements and from the open drains, the absolute lack of sunlight, the cold and dampness were all contributing causes but the real cause was the water. We had saturated ourselves with water from the source which was one of the causes the jail had been declared unsanitary and abandoned years before.” Soon Hunkins too had succumbed to the poisonous gases and water, “absolutely limp” in her cell.¹⁸

As word got out about these terrible conditions, pressure built on the Wilson administration to intercede, and at the end of the fifth day, all the prisoners were released. Hunkins came home in an ambulance. According to fellow prisoner Julia Emory, “it was hard to realize that the same girl who carried the American flag so steadily and bravely at the head of our processions was now being brought home wrapped in a blanket and violently ill.” Hazel Hunkins had more than earned her treasured prison pin.¹⁹

After her release, Hunkins once again had to do damage control at home. “An endless chain of exciting events has made life kaleidoscopic for the last month and I have no idea when you last heard of me,” she began, somewhat disingenuously. Despite “that awful piece” her mother had seen in the paper, she reassured her jauntily, “Well—I’m fully recovered from the hunger strike and am getting altogether too fat to please myself.” Somehow it seems unlikely that those cheery words reassured her mother, although the following sentence probably helped: “There is to be another demonstration in Wash. to-morrow and I am just dying to take part but another jail sentence so soon would not be fair to the N.W.R.B. so I’m not going to join in.”²⁰

Hazel Hunkins’s final arrest came in January 1919, when she took part in the NWP strategy of lighting perpetual “watchfires for freedom” outside the White House gates and burning Wilson’s speeches. While the NWP continued to pressure Congress until the suffrage amendment finally passed the Senate in June 1919, their militant actions and the resulting arrests basically ended in February and March.

By then, Hazel Hunkins was moving on as well. A free spirit when it came to feminist politics, she also embraced emancipated ideas about sex and marriage. Some time after her release from jail, she met journalist Charles Hallinan at a pacifist meeting where he was speaking, and they began an affair. He was married at the time, with a daughter, and his wife resisted a divorce. In July 1920, Hazel headed to England to conduct research for the American Railway Brotherhood, and Hallinan soon followed, becoming the London financial editor of United Press International. Their daughter was born in 1921, and they had three other children together but did not marry until 1930.²¹

Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan spent the rest of her life in England. In 1922, she joined the Six Point Group, Britain’s leading feminist organization, which worked towards improving the status of women in the economic, social, and political realms. She served as the group’s chair in the 1950s and 1960s, boasting to American feminists, “My very modest distinction is that I am the only American woman who has achieved the chairmanship of a national organisation (British) without having climbed to that office through marriage to an English title!”²² She never lost her admiration for Alice Paul, and she journeyed back to the United States in 1977 to speak at her memorial service. And while she was there, she marched in a demonstration organized by the National Organization for Women for the Equal Rights Amendment. Once a feminist, always a feminist.