Between 1917 and 1919, Stevens was a prominent participant in the Silent Sentinels vigil at Woodrow Wilson's White House to urge the passage of a constitutional amendment for women's voting rights and was arrested several times for her involvement.

After the 19th Amendment secured women's right to vote, she wrote a book, titled Jailed for Freedom (1920), which recounted the sentinel's ordeals.

Gaining approval for the work from the League of Nations in 1927, Stevens presented the proposal Pan American Union in 1928, convincing the governing body to create the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM).

Ousted from the CIM in 1938, and the NWP in 1947 over policy disputes, Stevens became vice president of the Lucy Stone League in 1951, of which she had been a member since the 1920s.

[7] She was hired by the NAWSA,[4] and was assigned to the newly formed Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CUWS),[8] which had been created by Alice Paul and Mary Ritter Beard.

[13] With the fissure, the Congressional Union began a reorganization to push for campaigns against Democratic candidates because they had not supported suffrage while they were in control of the legislature.

[13] Paul established an all-woman advisory council of suffrage workers and prominent women which included Bertha Fowler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Helen Keller, Belle Case La Follette, May Wright Sewall and educators such as Emma Gillett, Maria Montessori, and Clara Louise Thompson, a Latin Professor at Rockford College, among others, to lend credibility to the new organization.

[15] One of the first places Stevens traveled to was Colorado,[16] where CUWS was successful in attaining commitment from one congressman to support the women's cause.

[19] Undaunted, Whitney and Stevens continued their planning efforts[20] for the Panama Pacific Exposition CUWS Congress in San Francisco.

[20] After the September Congress, Stevens had planned to remain in San Francisco and run the exposition booth of CUWS, but she was forced to return to Washington because the eastern delegate Margaret Whittemore had left due to her marriage.

[23] At the beginning of 1916, Stevens announced the policy that the CUWS had organized in twenty-two states and planned on recruiting delegates for each of the 435 House Districts.

[30] Though she performed other organizational tasks, such as organizing the North Carolina branch of the NWP in March,[31] Stevens participated as a sentinel.

[37] He appeared with Stevens at fundraising events and helped raise thousands of dollars for their cause, which was gaining momentum, as President Wilson finally endorsed enfranchisement.

She was arrested again, along with Elsie Hill, Alice Paul and three "Jane Doe" suffragists at the NWP demonstration of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in March 1919.

[41] Over the years, Stevens held several important NWP leadership positions, including Legislative Chairman[42] and membership on the executive committee.

[46] On December 5, 1921, in Peekskill, New York, Stevens and Malone were secretly married by a hardware store owner who was a Justice of the Peace and immediately sailed[47] for their two-month honeymoon in Paris.

[48] From the middle of the 1920s, Stevens lived primarily in Croton-on-Hudson, New York,[1][49] where she became friends with leading members of the Greenwich Village radical scene and bohemians, including Louise Bryant,[50] Max and Crystal Eastman,[51] Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Reed and others.

In 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced by Daniel Read Anthony, Jr. and the women pushed for its passage, lobbying for support from both political parties.

Unable to run herself due to her having established a legal residence in France, Stevens worked toward the goal of securing the election of 100 women to Congress in states where female candidates were among contenders for office.

[54] Campaigning vigorously for its adoption, the "Wages for Wives" proposal called for a flexible contract which split marital assets 50-50 rather than treating married couples as a single entity and called for women to be paid a wage for domestic services and raising children as a protection for children's continuous support.

[57] Stevens met with feminists throughout Europe and held public meetings to gather data, including Dr. Luisa Baralt of Havana, Dr. Ellen Gleditsch of Oslo, Chrystal Macmillan and Sybil Thomas, Viscountess Rhondda of the UK, the Marquesa del Ter of Spain, Maria Vérone of France and Hélène Vacaresco of Romania, as well as various officers of the International Federation of University Women and others.

Stevens convinced the governing body of the Pan American Union to create the Inter-American Commission of Women (Spanish: Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres) (CIM) on April 4, 1928.

She and other suffragists picketed the French president, Gaston Doumergue, in 1928[64] in an attempt to get the world peace delegates to support an equal rights treaty.

[65] They were dismissively described by a journalist who did cover the event as "militant suffragettes," and a Paris paper called the protest "an amusing incident.

Presenting her data on what had been accomplished in the Americas, Stevens asked that the international community enact laws to protect women's citizenship.

They proposed a Treaty on the Equality of Rights for Women, and it was rejected by the conference, though it was signed by Cuba, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

[77] The Roosevelt administration, hoping to get rid of Stevens, then argued that the women's task was completed and the CIM should be abandoned.

[1] The following year, when Alice Paul returned from a two-year trip to Switzerland to establish the World Woman’s Party (WWP), difficulties arose.

During these tensions, a dissenting faction of NWP members tried to take over party headquarters and elect their own slate of officers,[85] but Pollitzer’s claim to leadership was supported by a ruling of a federal district judge.

[92] Shaina Taub began developing the show Suffs in the early 2010s, after she read Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens.