- Why do you do what you do?
- What services does LBI offer?
- Where are you located?
- When did LBI come into existence?
- Who was Lucy Burns?
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Why do you do what you do?
The internet can have a transformative impact on governance at the most local of levels. City governments, county governments, and school district administrations play a significant role in the lives of communities, families and individuals, but how they operate, make decisions and spend tax dollars can be mysterious. Without the ability to understand and share with others how governmental decisions are reached at these local levels, citizens have minimal ability to provide an informed perspective that can bring about positive change. We'd like to play a small part in empowering ordinary citizens with ways to both learn about local government, and share the information they learn with others.
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What services does LBI offer?
LBI provides resources to help citizens and activists access public records at the state and local level through the use of sunshine laws, open records statutes and Freedom of Information legislation.
We also compile and create resources that citizens and activists can use to compile and share information about city and county governments, school districts and state agencies.
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Where are you located?
The Lucy Burns Institute is headquartered in Madison, WI.
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When did LBI come into existence?
The Lucy Burns Institute was incorporated as a non-profit in December of 2006.
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Who was Lucy Burns?
Lucy Burns (1879-1966) was an American suffragist born to an Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York.
Burns and Alice Paul co-founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916 after being ejected from the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) because of a difference of opinion about tactics for demanding change and exposing the injustice of the status quo.
Tired of President Woodrow Wilson’s passivity on suffrage, the tactic adopted by the National Woman’s Party was to send dozens of women to picket the White House in Washington, DC, beginning in January 1917, for eight hours a day, six days a week.
For their presumption, they were attacked by the White House, by male and female onlookers, and by the press--especially the New York Times.
Once the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Woodrow Wilson saw the opportunity to portray the picketers as unpatriotic and to shut down their campaign.
When Lucy Burns appeared on the picket line in July 1917 with a banner saying that Russian women had more freedom--they could vote--than American women, she and five others were arrested.
Altogether, Burns was arrested and jailed seven times—the most of any American suffragist. In prison, she was force-fed and possibly tortured. A historian recounts that force feeding Lucy Burns required "five people to hold her down, and when she refused to open her mouth, they shoved the feeding tube up her nostril."
After American women gained the right to vote in 1920, Burns retired from political life. Returning to Brooklyn to live with her family, she went on to rear a newborn niece left motherless in 1923 by the death of Burns's youngest sister in childbirth. Taking solace in her commitment to Roman Catholicism, she died in 1966 after a long decline.
