This past weekend I visited the Workhouse Arts Center in
Lorton, Virginia, the former home of the Lorton Reformatory, in Northern
Virginia. Originally opened in 1910, it is
now a series of art galleries and working studios.
The artwork and various special programs that are offered by
the nonprofit which runs the cultural center is impressive, but so too is the
history of the prison, which closed sixteen years ago. In addition to hardened criminals, it also housed
political protesters such as Norman Mailer, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Noam
Chomsky. Mailer describes his brief
incarceration there in “The Armies of the Night.”
The grounds also housed a Nike missile site complete with
nuclear warheads. In fact, the first Nike
site was the first in the nation (1954)—part of the Washington, D.C., defense
program at the height of the Cold War.
But perhaps the most interesting story of the prison was the
incarceration of suffragists in 1917.
Known as the Silent Sentinel, they protested outside the White House in
1917. Among those imprisoned for their
activism were Alice Paul and twenty-year-old Dorothy Day. Some women began a hunger strike there and
were force fed by order of the warden. This
is captured in the movie “Iron Jawed Angels,” a 2004 movie featuring Hilary
Swank as Alice Paul.
Paul, who had been given a jail house door pendent for an
earlier political imprisonment, had 81 pins created for these women
protesters. The arts center museum sells
a copy.
The 19th amendment to the Constitution, giving
women the right to vote, was ratified in 1920.
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