What had started as a protest to get Woodrow Wilson to support a constitutional amendment to give all women the vote had by November 1917 become a political issue and a distraction to the nation’s war effort. Alice Paul and her supporters were about to go to court attempting to prove the U.S. government was illegally holding them, and subjecting them to “cruel and unusual punishment” for the crime of blocking the sidewalk.

Wilson’s fellow Democrats were becoming uneasy; with an eye on the 1918 election, the stories of the women being…