But some American suffragists

In 1907, an American Quaker named Alice Paul was studying in England when she joined British women in their campaign for suffrage. Over the next three years, while doing graduate work at the Universities of Birmingham and London, Paul was arrested and jailed three times for suffragist agitation. After returning to the United States, she joined the National American Suffrage Association, founded by Carrie Chapman Catt, but soon grew impatient with that organization’s mild-mannered tactics. In 1913, Paul and fellow militants formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, later the National Woman’s Party. Their demonstrations outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House in 1917 culminated in the so-called “Night of Terror” that November, during which guards at Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse brutally beat some 30 female picketers. At the time, Paul herself was serving a seven-month stint in prison, where she was force-fed and confined to a psychopathic ward. In January 1918, a district court overturned all the women’s sentences without ceremony; that same month, President Wilson declared his support for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (later the 19th Amendment) granting female suffrage.