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Community Corner

Suffragist of the Month: Dora Lewis

The trailblazer is among those recognized at Turning Point Suffrage Memorial in Occoquan Regional Park

Dora Lewis was one of the oldest suffragists imprisoned at the Occoquan Workhouse in the fall of 1917 and was also the most cruelly treated. In fact, she was nearly killed by prison guards during the Night of Terror, November 15th. 

Lewis was among several protesters arrested while picketing the Wilson White House. Along with her fellow protestors she was sentenced to jail and upon their arrival in Lorton, she demanded to be treated as political prisoners. Lewis was shouted at by guards and dragged away.  was Lewis’s cellmate. Of her experience that first night at Occoquan she wrote “we had only lain [in the cell] a few minutes, when Mrs. Lewis, doubled over and handled like a sack of something, was literally thrown in.” Lewis’s head struck the iron bed frame within the cell and she lay on the floor motionless. At this, Nolan and her cell mate, Alice Cosu, cried out to the attention of the warden, W.H. Whitaker. Whitaker came to the cell, but only to tell the women “not to dare speak or he would put the brace and bit in our mouths and the straitjacket on our bodies,” wrote Nolan. “We were so terrified we kept very still.”

Lewis, referred to as Mrs. Lawrence Lewis by her contemporaries, was from a prominent Philadelphia family. She joined the front lines of the suffrage movement along with and in 1913.  The pair had just broken away from the National American Women’s Suffrage Association and formed the National Women’s Party. The NWP attracted younger, more militant members eager for swift change. Lewis favored this approach, and marched and picketed with the younger women.

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Despite the brutality Lewis faced at Occoquan in 1917, the incident was far from the final time she risked arrest. In 1918 she was arrested in Lafayette Park as the keynote speaker in a protest in memory of fellow suffragist Inez Milholland. In 1919 she began the famous watch fire protests when she publically set fire to Woodrow Wilson’s speeches.  Wilson had already reversed course and expressed support for the suffrage movement but was not making good on his rhetoric. Dora Lewis and the NWP were not satisfied until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote. 

To learn more about Dora Lewis and the heroic women of the suffrage movement, please visit the website for the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial, presently under construction at Occoquan Regional Park. 

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