Mabel Vernon chained herself to the White House fence during a National Woman's Party demonstration on President Wilson's second inauguration day, dramatizing the suffrage demand.
On March 4, 1917, the day of President Woodrow Wilson's second inauguration, Mabel Vernon and fellow members of the National Woman's Party staged one of their boldest acts of civil disobedience. Vernon chained herself to the gates of the White House fence, holding a banner demanding that the president support a federal woman suffrage amendment, forcing onlookers and officials to confront the demand for political enfranchisement on the very day of Wilson's public celebration.
This act was emblematic of the escalating militant tactics adopted by the National Woman's Party (NWP), of which Vernon was a founding organizer alongside Alice Paul. Unlike the more moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association, the NWP embraced direct, confrontational public protest — picketing, chaining, and eventually hunger strikes — to keep suffrage in the national spotlight and pressure Wilson, who had been reluctant to endorse a constitutional amendment.
Vernon's action, though brief, was widely reported and added to the growing public controversy surrounding the 'Silent Sentinels' picketing campaign that had begun in January 1917. It underscored the willingness of suffragists to risk arrest and physical restraint to make their cause impossible to ignore.
The broader picketing campaign, including this protest, contributed to the political pressure that eventually led President Wilson to publicly support the Nineteenth Amendment in 1918, which was ratified in 1920, granting American women the right to vote.
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