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26 March 1877—10 January 1948

Women Pay the Price of War

The passage of the 1917 Espionage Act is one of the lowest points in U.S. history. Enacted after the country entered World War I, the law prescribed a $10,000 fine and up to twenty years imprisonment for anyone who interfered with the recruiting of soldiers. The act was deliberately written in such general terms that merely speaking out against the war could be interpreted as a violation of the law. So it quickly became a legal opportunity for rounding up people whom the authorities considered to be troublemakers. Before the war was over, nearly one thousand U.S. residents were convicted of breaking the Espionage Act. They included well-known left-leaning war resisters such as perennial presidential candidate Eugene Debs, anarchist Emma Goldman, and union organizer “Big” Bill Haywood.

Among those arrested and imprisoned was the socialist activist and author Kate Richards O’Hare. As early as 1914, three years before the United States went to war, she passionately condemned militaristic adventurism and pointed out that the victims of war include the mothers whose sons are devoured by it. “It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages,” she wrote, “and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”

Such declarations, not to mention her 1904 socialist novel What Happened to Dan? and the radical journal Rip-Saw which she edited with her husband, brought O’Hare to the attention of the authorities. Ready to arrest her at the slightest provocation, they took action against her in 1917 when she blasted the war in a speech delivered in Bowman, North Dakota. She was quickly convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to five years in prison, despite the fact that she was a mother of four. While serving her time in Missouri State Penitentiary, she wrote two books. One of them, In Prison, was a stark exposé of the conditions women prisoners endured behind bars. O’Hare’s graphic descriptions of guard brutality and lesbian sex between prisoners shocked the nation.

Although she didn’t lose a son in battle, O’Hare’s incarceration made her one of the women who pay the price for war. By the time her sentence was commuted by President Warren Harding in 1920, she had served close to four years. Upon her release, she worked hard for prison reform, especially for women inmates.