[4] Wenclawska was born in Suwałki, Congress Poland, and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was an infant.

Wenclawska became an excellent public speaker during her years of union activism and would travel across the country speaking to suffrage rallies, often with National Woman's Party founder Alice Paul.

[4][6] In February 1914, Wenclawska and Doris Stevens spoke at a mass meeting for working women and organized a mass suffrage parade in which working women marched to the White House to meet with Woodrow Wilson on suffrage rights.

There she compared Wilson unfavorably to Abraham Lincoln, who sacrificed his life to give freedom to slaves.

[6] These abuses resulted in a hunger strike, a symbolic protest that forced the authorities to either release them or torture them by force-feeding.

[9] In one of these letters she writes, "I am waiting to see what happens when the President realizes that brutal bullying isn’t quite a statesmanlike method for settling a demand for justice at home...All the officers here know we are making this hunger strike that women fighting for liberty may be considered political prisoners; we have told them.

Following more than two years of White House picketing, Congress approved the 19th Amendment and sent it out to the states for ratification, which followed in August 1920.

[5] Her engagement in political activism appears to have ended with her White House picketing and subsequent jail time.

She listed herself as an actress and performed in several plays in New York City, including a part in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, on Broadway in 1924.

[citation needed] Doris Stevens published excerpts of Wenclawska's smuggled diary scraps from her time spent in the Occoquan Workhouse in Jailed for Freedom (1920), a history of militant suffragists in the United States between 1913 and 1919.