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Josephine Day Bennett was a powerful campaigner for a woman’s right to vote as well as many progressive causes. She wanted to move Connecticut’s suffrage movement from “philosophical to political work,” and as such worked hard to include black and working class women in suffrage, union and civil rights movements.

Josephine was born in Hartford, Connecticut on May 4, 1880 to an upper-class family. Her parents were George Herbert Day and Katherine Beach Day, a renowned suffragist and civil rights activist herself. Little is known about Josephine’s early years except that around the turn of the century she married M. Toscan Bennett, a corporate lawyer and enthusiastic suffrage and organized labor supporter.

In 1911, Bennett, age 30, made her first public speaking appearance at Hartford’s State Capitol, where she spoke alongside Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA.) The suffrage movement had been around for decades  but had recently picked up steam. In 1913, Bennett organized the first suffrage group in West Hartford. A year later, she was one of the organizers of a massive suffrage parade of more than 1000 women dressed in costumes, riding on floats and carrying banners as they marched through Hartford’s streets where Bennett addressed the crowd from a street corner.

In the following years, Bennett, a “brilliant orator”  according to the press, lectured on suffrage and feminism throughout the United States and Europe. She understood that women needed power both at the ballot box and on the factory floor. A co-founder of the Hartford Equal Franchise League, she encouraged working women to join the suffrage cause. She also attended many union organizing meetings and joined picket lines with workers and strikers, advocating for better pay, better working conditions and an end to child labor. It was, she once pointed out, “a glorious thing to be an agitator.” In 1919, Bennett was one of the organizers of a local chapter of the American Labor Party. That same year she supported a garment workers’ strike in Hartford. On the first day of the strike, workers were roughed up and many were arrested for violence. Bennett recruited her lawyer brother, George Day, to defend those arrested and she accompanied them to court. She followed up by organizing and hosting a large union support rally, where one speaker dubbed her Hartford’s “City Mother.” That same year, she helped to launch a local chapter of the American Labor Party. “There shall be no subject nations, subject races, subject colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex,” the ALP platform proclaimed.

Breaking from some of her suffragist colleagues, Bennett firmly believed that women of color should be included in the suffrage movement. NAWSA leadership felt that the cause had a better chance of gaining Southern support if black women were excluded. In the winter of 1917, Mary Townsend Seymour, a prominent African-American civil rights and suffrage activist, invited Josephine to her house in Hartford to meet W.E.B. Du Bois and other important officials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  On the heels of that meeting, Seymour and Bennett helped to form the first Connecticut branch of the NAACP, with Seymour as official spokesperson.

Bennett is perhaps best known for her involvement in a protest in Washington, D.C. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson finally agreed to support women’s suffrage but many activists felt that his support was not enough to guarantee passage of the amendment in Congress. In the winter of 1919, the radical National Women’s Party, of which Bennett was a member, began lighting “Watchfires of Liberty,” in front of the White House. Police and other male onlookers harassed the suffragists. One day, Bennett decided to burn logs from the state of Connecticut while burning one of Wilson’s speeches. Police arrested and convicted her of illegally starting a fire on White House grounds and she was given a choice of paying a five-dollar fine or spending five days in jail. Bennett chose jail, claiming that disenfranchisement was a greater “indignity” than imprisonment. She joined a hunger strike with her fellow prisoners until she was released. She later said that “we of course refused to eat, but in any case the food was vile and unfit for human consumption.”

Even after the passage of the 19th Amendment, Bennett continued to fight for women’s rights. In 1920, she ran (unsuccessfully) for Connecticut Secretary of State. In 1923, inspired by Margaret Sanger’s speech , she, her mother and Katherine Houghton Hepburn founded the Connecticut branch of the American Birth Control League. And in 1934, the Connecticut League of Women Voters placed a small plaque at the Connecticut State Capitol honoring “Connecticut Woman who helped win the vote for the women of their country.” Josephine Bennett was among those named.

After a lifetime of fighting for women’s causes, Bennett died in 1961.

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