Burns, Lucy (1879–1966)

American suffragist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 28, 1879; died in 1966; graduated from Vassar College, 1902; graduate studies in Linguistics at Yale, Oxford, and the German universities of Berlin and Bonn.

In 1909, while working on her doctorate at Oxford, Lucy Burns became involved with the militant British suffragists, working as an organizer in Scotland until 1912. It was in Britain that she also met Alice Paul with whom she joined forces; her organizational and persuasive skills proved the perfect complement to Paul's talent as a strategist. Returning to the United States, the pair opened a Washington office in January 1913.

Hoping to breathe new life into the old National American Woman Suffrage Association and bring the suffrage issue to the forefront again, their first undertaking was an enormous parade held on the day prior to Woodrow Wilson's inauguration so as to attract influential politicians as well as the flood of journalists on hand in Washington. The event, attracting 5,000 marchers, was an enormous success, though the marchers were confronted by a jeering hostile crowd.

Burns proved especially valuable in the second phase of their plan, which was to build a new organization, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Using the techniques of the British militants, the group initiated a law-breaking campaign style that shocked the American public. Burns was arrested in 1913 for defacing public property with suffragist graffiti and would go on to eventually set a record as the suffragist who served the most time in jail. During the election of 1916, Burns took two dozen women across the country in a railroad car dubbed the "Suffrage Special" to campaign against the Democrats in states where women already had the vote. Undaunted, despite Wilson's reelection, she continued to lead demonstrations against his anti-suffrage stronghold. In 1917, when World War I began to dominate the news, Burns brought the suffrage issue back into focus by being arrested and imprisoned and going on a hunger strike for three weeks. In 1919, she organized another railroad-car campaign, filling the seats with women who had served time in jail for their suffrage activities.

After the vote was won in 1920, Lucy Burns abruptly abandoned the movement and returned to a lifestyle more in keeping with her strong Irish-Catholic background and deep family ties. Leaving Alice Paul to carry on with the National Woman's Party at the point of perhaps its greatest potential impact, Burns moved in with two unmarried sisters and spent the rest of her days caring for an orphaned niece. Although Lucy Burns lived until 1966, her years outside the cause obscured her contribution and left few who recalled her name.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts