Betty Gram

Betty Gram, born Myrtle Eveline Gram on March 16, 1893, and later known as Betty Gram Swing, was an American suffragist and stage performer who died on September 1, 1969. After graduating from the University of Oregon, she pursued a stage career that brought her to Broadway, where she appeared in the 1917 musical Good Night, Paul. She left that career when she traveled east to join the National Woman's Party, the militant suffrage organization led by Alice Paul.

The National Woman's Party had broken from other suffrage groups, including the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, over its insistence on a constitutional amendment and its confrontational tactics, which included targeting President Wilson and the Democratic Party. Gram joined the NWP's Silent Sentinels picket line at the White House in 1917, the same year she appeared on Broadway. On November 10, 1917, she and her sister Alice Gram were among more than forty women arrested on charges of obstructing traffic while protesting Alice Paul's seven-month jail sentence. The Oregonian covered the arrest and characterized the obstruction charge as a sham. Gram was quoted at the time stating that she was going to prison with full knowledge that she had committed no offense.

Rather than being held at a local jail, the November 10 picketers were sent to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where they were subjected to forced labor, isolation, beatings, and rancid food. After being denied recognition as political prisoners, the women launched a hunger strike. Gram and her sister were released after seventeen days, having lost twelve and nineteen pounds respectively, despite having been sentenced to thirty days. Over the course of her suffrage activism, Gram was jailed five times in total and participated in two hunger strikes.

Her activism continued into 1919. In January of that year, she stood guard outside the White House at a bonfire in which NWP members burned copies of President Wilson's speeches. The following month, she was arrested in Boston when twenty-one NWP members gathered in front of the State House with suffrage banners to protest Wilson's arrival in the city. Newspaper accounts from that arrest specifically noted that Gram resisted and had to be physically lifted into the police wagon.

Following Congress's passage of the Nineteenth Amendment on June 4, 1919, Gram shifted her focus to the state ratification campaign, working in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware, West Virginia, Tennessee, and other states. The Boston Herald identified her as one of the NWP's most experienced ratification campaigners when she was deployed to Delaware, where an active anti-suffrage movement had made the state a significant battleground. In July 1920, she traveled to Tennessee to work toward securing the thirty-sixth and final state ratification. A local newspaper marked her arrival with the headline, "110 Pounds of Femininity Hit Memphis." Tennessee ratified the amendment on August 18, 1920, completing the process.

In 1921, Gram married radio commentator and foreign correspondent Raymond Gram Swing. She agreed to take his surname on the condition that he also take hers, and the couple became known as Betty Gram Swing and Raymond Gram Swing. They had two sons and a daughter before divorcing in 1944. Her husband's career took them to England, where they lived for more than a decade, and Gram continued her work for women's rights in the United Kingdom and in international contexts during that period. Shortly after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, she had traveled to Europe to resume music studies before her marriage redirected her path.