File 89, March 1916-March 1917

After years of lobbying, petitioning, and parading, some suffragists felt that their tactics were growing stale and ineffective. On January 10, 1917, frustrated at President Woodrow Wilson’s flagrant dismissal of their demands, suffrage leader Alice Paul and the Congressional Union (CU) for Woman Suffrage instituted the practice of picketing the White House, the first political activists to do so. Documents in this section and in the following section of file 89, begin to reflect the public’s reactions to the more militant tactics, such as picketing, of the CU, later known as the National Woman’s Party (NWP).