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Catherine Flanagan, a working-class woman became a staunch soldier in the fight for women’s suffrage. Born in 1888 in Hartford, Connecticut, Catherine was the second of seven children in an Irish immigrant family. Her father came to the United States as a political exile because of his work for the Irish freedom movement. Following his untimely death, Catherine was forced to begin working at age thirteen and ultimately found steady employment as a bookkeeper and a stenographer.

In 1915, at the age of 26, Flanagan was hired by Katherine Houghton Hepburn, then president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, to be the office manager and secretary of the organization. She was an instant success, recognized as a young woman of personal integrity, organizational talent, and unflagging energy. During her tenure, she organized new state suffrage leagues, arranged mass meetings and personally lobbied state senators and representatives to support a woman’s right to vote.

Flanagan was not only the first working class suffrage worker in Connecticut, she was also the first working-class woman from Connecticut to be employed by the more militant National Woman’s Party (NWP.) She was inspired by their efforts and chose to spend her summer vacation in August 1917 by traveling to Washington, D.C. to picket with the NWP in front of the White House. She and the other activists, dubbed the “Silent Sentinels,” were protesting President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to endorse the suffrage amendment. Flanagan spent two weeks on the picket line. During the second week, mobs of men attacked the peaceful protesters. They knocked the women down, kicked them, tore up their banners and later fired shots into NWP headquarters, nearly hitting Flanagan who sought refuge in the building. The DC police, under orders from the Wilson administration, arrested Flanagan and five other suffragists, charging them with “obstructing traffic and unlawful assembly.” The women were tried and sentenced to 30 days at the notorious Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. Refusing to pay a fine of $10 each, Flanagan and her cohorts opted instead to go to jail.

The workhouse turned out to be a living nightmare. The women were publicly stripped and bathed, forced to use the toilet in front of male and female guards, and given rotten and maggot-infested food. Flanagan later wrote that “the bill of fare looks well on paper, but the fact remains that all you had to do was turn your spoon in the cabbage soup to see any number of worms.” They were forbidden legal representation or any access to books or newspapers.

Once released from Occoquan, Flanagan sent the press an account of her arrest, trial and treatment in jail. Her story was picked up by a Bridgeport weekly newspaper and quickly spread throughout the country. Editorial pages were flooded with sympathetic letters for the prisoners, swinging public support for suffrage. Flanagan resigned from the CWSA and officially joined the radical NWP, becoming a state and national organizer. A year after her arrest, President Wilson voiced his support for women’s suffrage in a speech to Congress.

Flanagan continued to work on suffrage campaigns up and down the East coast, from Vermont to West Virginia. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1920, Flanagan was there organizing and lobbying politicians. Women had finally won the right to vote! A week later, Connecticut ratified the amendment. Catherine Flanagan, regarded as a symbol of the movement, was chosen to take the ratification document to Washington, D.C and personally present it to the Secretary of State.

In the years following the passage of the 19th Amendment, Catherine Flanagan played a key role in the campaign for the United States to recognize the Irish Republic. In 1921, she married and moved to Utah where she died six years later, cause of death, ectopic pregnancy, as stated on the death certificate.

Her courage under challenging circumstances during the suffrage drive did not waver. Emerging from her ordeal in jail, she told reporters:” I am perfectly willing to go back to the picket line. I feel that it is a little thing to do towards the accomplishment of a great purpose.”

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