Lucy Burns
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- For other people named Burns, see Burns (disambiguation).
Lucy Burns (July 28, 1879-December 22, 1966) was an American suffragist and women's rights advocate. She was a close friend of Alice Paul. Together, they formed the National Woman's Party.
Burns was born in Brooklyn, New York to an Irish Catholic family. She was a gifted student and attended university at Vassar College and Yale University before becoming an English teacher. At age twenty-seven she moved to Germany and later to the United Kingdom, where she graduated from Oxford University.
While in England she met Paul after becoming a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, an organization dedicated to fighting for women's rights in the United Kingdom. Burns and Paul were among those sent to jail for protesting. The feminist struggle for equality and woman's suffrage in the U.K. inspired Burns and Paul to continue the fight on their return to the United States. They joined the National American Women Suffrage Association as its Congressional lobbyists. However, they eventually split from NAWSA in a dispute over tactics and, in 1913 formed the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage.
Three years later, disastisfied with the progress of congressional lobbying, they formed the National Woman's Party (NWP). They were feared and despised by many men of the era, and were opposed by conservative women as well as by more conservative suffragettes who advocated less militant tactics. However, Burns and Paul, were committed to direct action in fighting for women's rights, particularly the right to vote. The National Woman's Party led dozens of women to picket the White House in Washington, D.C. beginning in 1916. The NWP was not political party per se and did not run candidates for office. A bi-partisan organization, it directed its attacks at the office of the President of the United States, in this case, Woodrow Wilson. Burns also opposed World War I, seeing it as a war led by powerful men that resulted in young men being drafted and giving their lives with little free will.
Burns was arrested while picketing the White House and went to jail several times. In jail, Burns joined Alice Paul and many other women in hunger strikes, to demonstrate their commitment to their cause, claiming that they were political prisoners. Burns was force-fed and possibly tortured, as was Paul. Of the well-known suffragists of the era, Burns spent the most time in jail.
After women gained the right to vote in the United States, Burns retired from political life. She died on December 22, 1966.
In 2004, HBO Films broadcast "Iron Jawed Angels", chronicling the struggle of Lucy Burns, Alice Paul and other suffragists.
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