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Played by Frances O'Connor
LUCY BURNS (1879-1966)
Alice Paul called her good friend Lucy Burns "a thousand times more valiant than I." The two were considered the next-generation incarnation of suffrage pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A key organizer for the National Woman's Party, Burns was educated at Vassar and Yale. After teaching English at Erasmus High School, she went to England to study at Oxford but soon abandoned a promising academic career in linguistics in favor of political activism. Involved with the Pankhursts and militant British suffragists, Burns was a paid organizer in Edinburgh from 1910 to 1912. In 1913 she worked closely with Alice Paul to organize the Woman Suffrage March in Washington, D.C., on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. From 1915 to 1916 she edited The
Suffragist, a newspaper devoted to women's voting issues; in 1917, along with Paul and numerous other suffragists, she was sentenced to the Occoquan Workhouse for
picketing the White House. Burns embarked on a 19-day hunger strike in November 1917; like Paul, she was force-fed. In all, Burns was arrested six times and spent more time in jail than any other American suffragist.
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