page_title: Doris Stevens
section_title: Suffrage
hierarchical_section_title: Doris Stevens / Suffrage
caption_attribution_description: Summary: Outdoor photograph of three National Woman's Party members in prison dress carrying wooden chairs, on rooftop of building. (Left to right): Doris Stevens, Alison Turnbull Hopkins, and Eunice Dana Brannan. Doris Stevens of New York City, previously of Omaha, Neb., was arrested for picketing the White House on July 14, 1917 and sentenced to 60 days in Occoquan Workhouse; she was pardoned by President Wilson after 3 days. She was arrested in New York in March 1919, during the picket demonstration of the Metropolitan Opera House during Wilson's appearance there, but was not sentenced. Allison Turnbull Hopkins, of Morristown, NJ, was state chairman of the NWP. Her husband was a supporter of President Wilson and he served on the Democratic National Committee in 1916. She was arrested July 14, 1917, for picketing, and sentenced to 60 days in Occoquan Workhouse; she was pardoned after 3 days. Eunice Dana Brannan, state chair of the New York branch of the NWP, was arrested picketing July 14, 1917, sentenced to 60 days, and pardoned after 3. She was arrested again picketing Nov. 10, 1917 and sentenced to 45 days. Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 356, 361-62, 368.
context_page_description: Doris Stevens was an American suffragist, woman's legal rights advocate and author. She was the first female member of the American Institute of International Law and first chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women.
  Born in 1888 in Omaha, Nebraska, Stevens became involved in the fight for suffrage while a college student at Oberlin College. After graduating with a degree in sociology in 1911, she taught briefly before becoming a paid regional organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association's Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. When the CUWS broke from the parent organization in 1914, Stevens became the national strategist. She was in charge of coordinating the women's congress, held at the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915. When the CUWS became the National Woman's Party in 1916, Stevens organized party delegates for each of the 435 Congressional Districts in an effort to attain national women's enfranchisement and defeat candidates who were opposed to women's rights.
context_section_description: In 1913, Stevens arrived in Washington to take part in the June picketing of the Senate. She did not plan to stay, but Alice Paul convinced her to do so. She was hired by the NAWSA, and was assigned to the newly formed Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CUWS), which had been created by Alice Paul and Mary Ritter Beard. At that time, the Congressional Union was a subdivision of the NAWSA, though it operated independently. Stevens was hired to serve as executive secretary in Washington, D. C., as well as serve as regional organizer and was assigned the eastern district. Paul had divided the nation into quadrants of twelve states each and assigned Stevens to the eastern area, Mabel Vernon to the middle west, Anne Martin to the far west, and Maud Younger to the south. The regional organizers were tasked with educating groups about the suffrage bills that were in Congress and garnering support from each state for ratifying national suffrage. Rather than follow the previous strategy of achieving enfranchisement on a state-by-state basis, the Congressional Union Strategy was full federal approval. This issue, caused a rift in the suffrage movement at the 1913 Convention, causing Paul and her supporters to break ties with the NAWSA and become an independent organization.
  With the fissure, the Congressional Union began a reorganization to push for campaigns against Democratic candidates because they had not supported suffrage while they were in control of the legislature. Paul established an all-woman advisory council of suffrage workers and prominent women which included Bertha Fowler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Helen Keller, Belle Case La Follette, May Wright Sewall and educators such as Emma Gillett, Maria Montessori, and Clara Louise Thompson, a Latin Professor at Rockford College, among others, to lend credibility to the new organization. Stevens became the national organizer, charged with organizing women in states in which they were able to vote to use their ballots and oppose any candidate not in favor of full enfranchisement of women. One of the first places Stevens traveled to was Colorado, where CUWS was successful in attaining commitment from one congressman to support the women's cause. Returning from that success in January 1915, she went to New York City and Newport, Rhode Island to campaign before heading west. She campaigned in Kansas, hoping to secure delegates for a convention planned in San Francisco for September.
  
  Arriving in California in June, Stevens accompanied a group of women led by Charlotte Anita Whitney to meet with House Appropriations Committee members who were meeting at the Palace Hotel, in San Francisco. The women had been assured that they would be able to present their issues, but the chair, Representative John J. Fitzgerald of New York, refused to allow it. Undaunted, Whitney and Stevens continued their planning efforts for the Panama Pacific Exposition CUWS Congress in San Francisco. In San Francisco at the CUWS headquarters in 1915, Stevens discussed the strategy of employing a "million-vote smile", positing that smiling was a useful tool in the fight to win over men's support. "Smile on men and they will give you a vote. Look severe and they won't," she stated. However, when Alice Paul arrived two weeks before the event, she canceled choral events, a parade and a mass meeting that had been planned for the Scottish Rite Hall. Stevens had been involved in supervising each of these events, though local women planned and orchestrated them. Paul did keep the luncheon and a ball to be held at the California building of the exposition. After the September Congress, Stevens had planned to remain in San Francisco and run the exposition booth of CUWS, but she was forced to return to Washington because the eastern delegate Margaret Whittemore had left due to her marriage. Stevens immediately began planning for a convention to be held in Washington in December. 
  
  At the beginning of 1916, Stevens announced the policy that the CUWS had organized in twenty-two states and planned on recruiting deleg
caption: National Woman's Party members in prison dress carrying wooden chairs, on rooftop of building. (Left to right): Doris Stevens, Alison Turnbull Hopkins, and Eunice Dana Brannan, 1919
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