Alison Turnbull Hopkins

Alison Turnbull Hopkins (May 20, 1880 – March 18, 1951) was an American suffrage activist, known as one of the "Silent Sentinels" for her protests at the White House.

Alison Low Turnbull was born in 1880, to Frank and Marion Louise Bates Turnbull, in Morristown, New Jersey. Her father was a naval officer. She was privately tutored and received no other schooling.

Alison Turnbull Hopkins was on the executive board of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and was New Jersey state chair for the National Woman's Party. She was also active in local Morristown charities and women's clubs, and was a member of Heterodoxy, a women's debating club based in New York City. As a Woman's Party leader, she campaigned against Woodrow Wilson in the 1916 presidential election, while her husband campaigned for Wilson. Among her notable political stunts was a speaking tour through Illinois in a car bearing the slogan "Don't Vote for Wilson," following William Jennings Bryan on his lecture tour.

On Bastille Day in 1917, she was part of a group of suffrage protesters arrested at the White House. She was sentenced to jail at Occoquan Workhouse, but she was pardoned after three days by Woodrow Wilson, at the request of her husband. She returned to her White House protest after this incident, displaying a sign that read "We ask not pardon for ourselves but justice for all American women." Having spent any time at all in Occoquan Workhouse was a matter of pride among American suffragists; Mrs. Hopkins posed in her prison garb for publicity photos, lectured on the experience, and received honors as an imprisoned picket for several years after the event.

After suffrage was won, Alison Turnbull Hopkins opened a dress shop in New York City, called Marjane Ltd.

Alison Turnbull married John Appleton Haven Hopkins, an insurance executive and suffrage supporter, on October 8, 1901; she was his second wife. The couple lived in New York City, with a second residence at Featherleigh Farms, her father's estate in New Jersey. They had three children, John (b. 1903), Marion (b. 1904), and Douglas (b. 1908). The Hopkinses divorced in 1927. Alison Turnbull Hopkins died in 1951, age 70. Her niece was socialite Marjorie Oelrichs.

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