Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

Event

Location

225 King St, Charleston, SC 29401, USA

Lat/Long

32.780692560781, -79.933456505503

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

On February 16, 1919, the “Prison Special” tour made a stop at the Academy of Music in Charleston, South Carolina. This was the first stop on a cross-country speaking tour organized by the National Woman’s Party (NWP) to advocate for the passage of a women’s suffrage federal amendment, capitalizing on the publicity garnered after the arrest of suffrage picketers in Washington, D.C.

The “Prison Special” tour included NWP members who had been previously arrested and jailed as a result of their participation in suffrage demonstrations in the nation’s Capitol. These dramatic suffrage demonstrations, and the publicity around the suffragists’ subsequent arrests, helped bring national attention to the cause of women’s suffrage and the passage of a women’s suffrage amendment to the federal constitution. The NWP used the “Prison Special” tour to further increase public support for the women’s suffrage movement.

The tour included 22 members of the NWP who had served jail time in Washington, D.C. It departed from the Capitol on February 15, making its first stop in Charleston, South Carolina on February 16. The tour then continued through the South to the West Coast, and then travelled back across the county to end once again in Washington, D.C. Mass meetings, like the one at the Academy of Music in Charleston, were planned at stops along the tour route. At these meetings, the women wore replicas of prison uniforms and made impassioned speeches describing their poor treatment during their arrests and imprisonment. The women specifically called out the Democratic Party, which had control of both the House and Senate at the time, and the Wilson Administration for its inactivity on the proposed women’s suffrage amendment, also placing blame on the Administration for their arrest and mistreatment of the suffragists.

In the February 15, 1919 edition of The Suffragist, the official publication of the NWP, Abby Scott Baker, NWP publicity manager, explained the stance of the NWP and the purpose of the “Prison Special” tour:

We intend to make it clear to the people of the country that the Administration is responsible for the fact that American women are forced to endure imprisonment in their effort to secure passage of the amendment.

The idea prevails that President Wilson has done everything he could for suffrage. But the fact is that though he spoke for it he neither preceded nor followed his speech by any effective effort to secure the passage of the amendment; that he has never secured a party caucus on this measure, as he has on those which he has pushed with vigor; that he has urged the election of men whom he knew would vote against suffrage, has failed to denounce the ones who refused to support him on this issue as he has denounced his opponents on other issues, and that he has permitted the floor leader and spokesman of his party to lead the opposition against the enfranchisement of women, in the Senate.

At the Charleston stop of the “Prison Special” tour, approximately 3,000 people attended the meeting at what was then the Academy of Music, on the corner of King and Market Streets. Accounts of the event published in contemporary newspapers described how the crowd of spectators was so large that an open-air meeting had to be held simultaneously in the street outside the Academy of Music. The February 19, 1919 edition of the Sumter Watchman and Southron noted that the suffragists regarded the Charleston meeting as “a magnificent triumph for their cause.”

Due to the efforts of suffragists, like those NWP members who campaigned in the Capitol and toured the country on the “Prison Special,” finally, on June 4, 1919, the United States Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” While the state of South Carolina rejected the amendment, by August 1920, 36 other states had ratified it, securing women’s right to vote across the United States, including in South Carolina.