Dora Lewis - Infinite Women

The following is republished from the WAPUSH campaign, an initiative to get women’s history into US schools.

Born: 13 October 1862, United States
Died: 31 January 1928
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Dora Kelly

Chairman of NWP Pennsylvania, Member of NWP Executive Committee

Dora Kelly Lewis, also known as Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, was a prominent leader in the National Women’s Party. She was born in 1862 to a prominent Philadelphia family of artists, activists, and philanthropists. She married young lawyer Lawrence Lewis in 1883, with whom she had sons Robert and Shippen and a daughter, Louise. Lewis was widowed in 1890 after her husband was involved in a train accident. From there, Lewis became increasingly involved in various social causes, such as the labor movement during the 1909-1910 Triangle Shirtwaist strikes and prison reform demonstrations. She also began working for the suffragist cause, joining the first executive committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Congressional Committee, chaired by Alice Paul. Lewis became an early supporter of Paul and was one of the first to join when Paul broke with NAWSA to form the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913, which later became the NWP. Throughout her time with the organization, Lewis served as a member of the executive committee in 1913, chairman of the finance committee in 1918, national treasurer in 1919, and chairman of NWP Pennsylvania. Additionally, her status as a wealthy widow gave her the ability to travel and raise funds for the NWP.

Lewis engaged in numerous protests and demonstrations that resulted in her arrest. In 1917, during the Russian Mission’s visit to the White House, she and Lucy Burns held a banner reading:
“To the Russian mission: President Wilson and Envoy Root are deceiving Russia. They say, ‘we are a democracy. Help us with a world war so that democracies may survive.’ We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement. Help us make this nation really free. Tell our Government that it must liberate its people before it can claim Russia as an ally.”

Later that year, Lewis protested the arrest and denial of Alice Paul’s status as a political prisoner and was subsequently arrested and sentenced to 60 days in Occoquan Workhouse. On November 14, 1917, she arrived and requested political prisoner status for herself and her fellow suffragists, which the prison superintendent denied. That night, Lewis and the other women experienced severe abuse from the guards; when a nearly sixty-year-old Lewis was thrown into a cell and hit her head, some of her fellow prisoners thought she was dead. Lewis and Paul led hunger strikes and were subjected to force-feedings. When habeas corpus proceedings were brought by suffragist lawyers on November 23, Lewis was one of three prisoners deemed too ill to make the journey to court, which her attorney claimed was due to the abuse she suffered from the guards.

After her release, Lewis continued her work for suffrage. She was the main speaker at a 1918 demonstration in Lafayette Square in memory of Inez Milholland, protesting the Senate’s inaction on suffrage and President Wilson’s reluctance to press the issue. She managed to say, “I want to tell you why we are here today,” before being arrested for protesting without a permit. In 1919, she began the Watchfire protests by burning one of Wilson’s speeches on New Year’s Day. She also traveled to campaign for the ratification of the 19th Amendment, serving as the Chairman of Ratification in Pennsylvania and advocating in Georgia to secure its support. After Georgia’s repudiation, she continued her efforts in Kentucky, which ratified the Amendment in January 1920.

Post-ratification, she worked in 1921 to raise funds for a statue of Stanton, Anthony, and Mott in the Capitol. That year, Lewis also wrote a notable letter to the editor of The Nation, responding to Florence Kelley and other women who criticized the NWP’s approach to class and racial struggles. In the letter, she defended the NWP’s continued focus on the “cause of women as long as women were still in so many ways, unfree.” Lewis died in 1928, though little is known about how she spent the final years of her life. Likely, she was quite sickly and unable to continue working for women’s rights as intensely, as she was in her sixties and had endured considerable abuse during her years with the NWP.