Paul, like Anthony and Stanton before her, scorned this methodology and believed in dramatic, uncompromising action. It is possible that the [women's suffrage] issue needed both political styles...
There is no doubt that the Woman's Party women re-energized the cause, and they believed they deserved credit for doing so. It was their women, after all, who showed such dedication that more than 200 of them had been arrested during White House demonstrations; almost half of these women were jailed, where they endured particularly harsh conditions, including rotten food and suffocating air. In October 1917 they began a campaign to draw attention to themselves as political prisoners, arguing that they were in jail because of their ideas, rather than for the petty crimes that were the ostensible reason for arrest.
Led by Lucy Burns, some began hunger strikes to protest a judicial system that refused to recognize their constitutional rights. Burns went without food for almost three weeks; only when she was too weak to resist did her guards finally manage to force-feed her. The newspapers were full of stories of the pain that these women endured when jailers jammed tubes down their throats, gagging and nauseating them. Their obvious devotion to the cause brought sympathy from many. More and more, the public responded with anger at those who continued to make the old authoritarian arguments against the vote--the fundamental point of the democracy for which the nation allegedly was fighting abroad.
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