Reply #48: Here: MISS ALICE PAUL ON HUNGER STRIKE;

[Zorra]

Suffragist Leader Adopts This Means of Protesting Against Washington Prison Fare. NOW IN JAIL HOSPITAL Threatens to Starve to Death Unless Better Food Is Provided for Six Companions.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6.-- Alice Paul, National Chairman of the Woman's Party, now doing a seven months' sentence in jail here for picketing the White House, has gone on a hunger strike, and tonight she had been in the jail hospital without food for the preceding twenty-four hours, stolidly ...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50E16F8...

In the US presidential election of 1916, Paul and the NWP campaigned against the continuing refusal of President Woodrow Wilson and other incumbent Democrats to support the Suffrage Amendment actively. In January 1917, the NWP staged the first political protest to picket the White House. The picketers, known as "Silent Sentinels," held banners demanding the right to vote. This was an example of a non-violent civil disobedience campaign. In July 1917, picketers were arrested on charges of "obstructing traffic." Many, including Paul, were convicted and incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia (later the Lorton Correctional Complex) and the District of Columbia Jail.<3>

In a protest of the conditions in Occoquan, Paul commenced a hunger strike, which led to her being moved to the prison’s psychiatric ward and force-fed raw eggs through a feeding tube. This, combined with the continuing demonstrations and attendant press coverage, kept pressure on the Wilson administration.<3> In January, 1918, Wilson announced that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure", and strongly urged Congress to pass the legislation. In 1920, after coming down to one vote in the state of Tennessee, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution secured the vote for women.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

That's the idea behind it.