“They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.”
When Paul led the women in a hunger strike, following the example of the British suffragists who demanded recognition as political prisoners, they were torturously force-fed. Paul was shut in solitary confinement and committed to a psychiatric institution. Woodrow Wilson wrote to his daughter that the suffragists "seem bent upon making their cause as obnoxious as possible.”