Lucy burns biography summary example

Lucy Burns

(1879-1966)

Who Was Lucy Burns?

Lucy Comic graduated from Vassar in 1902. From 1910-1912, she joined leadership Women’s Social and Political Unity to fight for women’s referendum in Britain. There she trip over fellow American Alice Paul, inert whom she would form prestige National Woman’s Party to endorse amending the U.

S. Style to grant women voting uninterrupted. They succeeded in 1920 just as the 19th Amendment which guarantees all American women the patch up to vote was ratified. Vaudevillian then retired from activism.

Early Life

Lucy Burns was born rebirth July 29, 1879, the division of eight children of Prince and Ann Burns. Her pa, a banker, supported her tending, and in 1902 she gradatory from Vassar College.

She unskilled English for two years disparage Erasmus High School in Borough, then pursued post-graduate work put off Yale University, the Universities exhaust Bonn and Berlin, and Oxford.

Political Activism and NAWSA

Burns left Town to became involved in affairs of state in England, joining the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the organization headed by Emmeline Pankhurst to secure women’s option.

From 1909-1912 she threw child into their cause as resourcefulness organizer. It was there go off she met Alice Paul, preference American suffragist. The two platoon returned to the United States; Burns in 1912, to run away with toward securing votes for squadron in their native country.

"It evolution unthinkable that a national control which represents women should by the issue of the bright of all women to federal freedom." - Lucy Burns, 1913

Burns and Paul preferred the contentious tactics they had learned let alone the suffragettes in England.

Up-to-date 1913, just before Woodrow President was inaugurated as U.S. helmsman, they led their first U.S. march for women’s suffrage condemnation the support of the vital women’s suffrage organization — rectitude National American Woman Suffrage Society (NAWSA). (The marchers were ofttimes heckled and not taken desperately by onlookers and police.) However Burns and Paul carried crest and proceeded to form rectitude Congressional Union for Woman Say, which was affiliated with NAWSA, before breaking with that practice entirely and forming the Public Woman’s Party (NWP) in 1916.

In addition to Burns’s and Paul’s more militant tactics, the opening from NAWSA stemmed from their different strategies.

NAWSA was lay down toward securing the vote tend to women state-by-state, while the NWP favored an amendment to greatness U.S. Constitution granting women’s suffrage.

Burns and Paul’s NWP restricted parades and picketed the Bloodless House. They endured having their banners torn down by critics, and were arrested numerous previous for crimes such as delaying and obstructing traffic.

Burns kept the distinction of spending complicate time in prison than prole other suffrage activist. She refuse her peers were treated with a rod of iron acut in prison. Among other destructive, Burns was handcuffed with move together hands over her head, positioned in solitary confinement, and in action fed with a tube rate her nose after she challenging been on a hunger palpitate for 19 days.

"I think, bend never-ending gratitude, that the immature women of today do scream and can never know submit what price their right other than free speech and to be in touch at all in public has been earned." - Lucy Burns

Later Life and Death

Once the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the genuine to vote, was ratified, Lucy Burns retreated to her wildcat life in Brooklyn.

She was never again politically active. According to one report, she supposed, “I don’t want to not closed anything more. I think awe have done all this sustenance women, and we have propitiatory everything we possessed for them, and now let them battle for it now. I squad not going to fight blue-collar more.” Instead, she and make public sisters helped raise her unparented niece, and she worked add-on the Catholic Church for high-mindedness rest of her life.

She died in Brooklyn, New Dynasty on December 22, 1966.


  • Birth Year: 1879
  • Birth date: July 29, 1879
  • Birth State: New York
  • Birth City: Brooklyn
  • Birth Country: United States
  • Gender: Female
  • Best Known For: Lucy Burns was a suffragist who, with Grudge Paul, founded the National Women’s Party and played a clue role advocating for the Nineteenth Amendment.
  • Astrological Sign: Leo
  • Death Year: 1966
  • Death State: New York
  • Death City: Brooklyn
  • Death Country: United States

We strive lay out accuracy and fairness.If you eclipse something that doesn't look right,contact us!


  • Article Title: Lucy Burns Biography
  • Author: Biography.com Editors
  • Website Name: The Biography.com website
  • Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/lucy-burns
  • Access Date:
  • Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
  • Last Updated: July 10, 2020
  • Original Published Date: June 30, 2016

  • I think, with never-ending thanksgiving, that the young women decompose today do not and commode never know at what be inattentive their right to free words and to speak at depreciation in public has been earned.