Suffragist of the Month - Rose Winslow

Some of our best sources of knowledge about the struggle for women’s suffrage are the women themselves. Many managed to keep journals even under the stress of imprisonment. These accounts were later published, and when the brutality leveled upon the women was revealed, the tide of public sentiment began to turn in favor of winning the right to vote. One courageous woman who kept a record of her violent force-feedings was Rose Winslow.

Born Ruza Wenclawska in Poland, Rose’s parents immigrated to the United States when she was an infant. The Wenclawskas were a working class family and Rose was laboring in a textile factory by age 11. Her father worked as a coal miner and a steel worker, and having been exposed to the conditions of working class life, Rose became a union organizer and factory inspector in New York City.

Rose Winslow brought her passion for social justice to her work in the suffrage movement with the National Women’s Party. She engaged in picket line, protests and spoke to crowds. She would often collapse of exhaustion as she suffered from an early bout with tuberculosis and her health never quite rebounded. Still, like so many of her compatriots, she sacrificed her body and her freedom for the cause of women’s rights. 

Rose was imprisoned at both the Occoquan Workhouse and the District of Columbia jail. At the latter, she led a hunger strike along with Alice Paul. Her journal of the event was reprinted in the book “Jailed for Freedom,” published in 1920 by Doris Stevens. “I had a nervous time of it, gasping a long time afterward,” she wrote. Of the horrific experience she concludes “one feels so forsaken when one lies prone and people shove a pipe down one’s stomach.”

Neither Rose nor Alice Paul were deterred by the cruelty and knew their stories would impact the debate once told. “I am waiting to see what happens when the President realizes that brutal bullying isn’t quite a statesmanlike method for settling a demand for justice at home,” Winslow wrote.

In the end of course, Rose’s fortitude paid off in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment, which President Wilson later backed. Her noble contribution and the pain she endured to bring about the vote will never be forgotten. Noting the ultimate importance of her heroic effort, Winslow stated “all the officers here know we are making this hunger strike that women fighting for liberty may be considered political prisoners; we have told them. God knows we don’t want other women ever to have to do this over again.”

To learn more about the brave women of the suffrage movement, visit the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial website at http://www.suffragistmemorial.org.

Note: On the 19th day of each month Lorton Patch will recognize a Suffragist of the Month in honor of the 19th Amendment and the Turning Point Suffragists Memorial in Occoquan Regional Park.