Since early January, Paul had orchestrated an unprecedented campaign of picketing the White House as public protest against the failure of the Wilson Administration to support woman suffrage. Over time, the picketing campaign had transformed from a genteel demonstration for the vote into a full-scale legal battle with local police and Administration officials over the right to speak freely and to petition the government. By the fall of 1917, more than a hundred women had been arrested and imprisoned on charges of obstructing traffic and unlawful assembly, ostensibly because they attracted large and often hostile crowds to witness their demonstrations. After months of overseeing the battle from NWP headquarters at Lafayette Square, Paul deliberately courted arrest in order to put the next phase of her campaign into operation. She defiantly informed a municipal court judge that she had no obligation to obey laws when she had no part in the making of them, and was sentenced to seven months in prison for picketing at the White House on October 22, 1917. Two weeks later, on November 5, Paul began a hunger strike at the District of Columbia Jail to protest the refusal of prison officials to grant her and her fellow suffrage inmates the status of "political prisoner." Panicked by the prospect of Paul's martyrdom while under their care, officials for the District Jail had called in noted psychiatrist William Alanson White, the head of St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane, to evaluate her sanity, and to determine whether she should be fed by force. Slight of build and soft-spoken, and raised in a prosperous Quaker household in 2 See generally Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder (1975) Although "suffragette" was quickly embraced by the militants in the WSPU, most American suffragists resisted the term "suffragette" as pejorative. The NWP's official newspaper was called The Suffragist and its members referred to themselves this way as well.

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