Lucy Burns

Lucy Burns ( born July 28, 1879 in Brooklyn, New York, † December 22, 1966 ibid ) was an American suffragette and suffragist. Together with Alice Paul, with whom she was a close friend, and a number of other women she led 1912-1920 the successful struggle for women's suffrage in the United States. Burns and Paul were the founders of the National Woman 's Party (NWP ), an American women's rights organization.

Life

Burns was born as the daughter of an Irish Catholic family. After school, she studied at Vassar College and Yale University; thereafter, she worked as an English teacher at short notice. At 26, she went to Germany in 1906 to two years to study languages ​​there. She then returned to New York, where she worked as a teacher in public schools again. Three years later, she traveled to England, where she completed a further course of study at Oxford University.

Here Burns also joined, headed by Emmeline Pankhurst and Christabel women's rights organization Women's Social and Political Union ( WSPU ), where she met Alice Paul. The two women soon joined a deep friendship. Burns and Paul were arrested multiple times in their protests and sentenced to prison.

1910 turned the two women returned to the U.S. to breathe new life into the American woman suffrage movement with the radical ideas of the English suffragettes. They joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( NAWSA ), but in 1913 it came on the objectives and strategies within the NAWSA to a rift. Carrie Chapman Catt as president of NAWSA took a moderate course and sat on achieving women's suffrage at the federal level about the electoral law in the individual states. Burns and Paul, however, took the view to pursue a direct struggle for suffrage at the federal level and, if necessary, shall be used in even radical methods of protest. An aligned by Burns and Paul 1913 women parade in Washington, DC Although ended in disaster, as the police violent attacks of the audience did not prevent the women, but the women's finally brought the needed attention of the press.

Burns and Paul split up shortly afterwards with the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage ( CUWS ), previously a working group of the NAWSA, of this from. From 1915 CUWS went forth the radical NWP. As of 1916, the NWP organized regular vigils outside the White House, where they demanded women's suffrage at the federal level.

With the U.S. entry into World War worsened the situation of the suffragettes of the NWP. Your vigils outside the White House were denounced as traitors, sometimes assaulted and arrested by the police. Lucy Burns, Alice Paul and 33 other women were convicted in October 1917 with a flimsy justification to several months imprisonment and under extreme conditions in the women's prison Occoquan Workhouse (now the Lorton Correctional Complex) imprisoned. The women prisoners were on a hunger strike immediately and claimed a status as political prisoners. The prison responded by solitary confinement and brutal force-feeding.

When the press learned of the conditions of detention of women's rights, she began to report in detail about it. Protests against the treatment of women in prison were loud and even the hitherto restrained NAWSA said the government war on. Then the imprisoned NWP activists in late November 1917 released from prison. The sentences were later declared by the U.S. Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.

Lucy Burns held the record of convictions and arrests in the struggle for women's suffrage. No other known Suffragette sat in prison more often than they do.

After 26 August 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified, Burns retired from politics to live with her family. She was laid to rest in the cemetery of Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Find out more

The history of the struggle for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was made ​​into a film under the title Iron Jawed Angels director Katja von Garnier from 2004. The Australian actress Frances O'Connor played the role of Lucy Burns.

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