The NWP continued its Silent Sentinel campaign, which became increasingly provocative. On Bastille Day, July 14, 1917, sixteen women including four from New Jersey were arrested picketing in front of the White House carrying a banner carried proclaiming “America Is Not a Democracy. Twenty Thousand Million Women Are Denied the Right to Vote,” and were sentenced to sixty days in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia on the charge of obstructing traffic. Although they were pardoned by Wilson three days later, picketing continued through the summer, with women occasionally roughed up by the crowd who considered them unpatriotic in wartime. In October, Alice Paul started picketing and was sentenced to seven months in jail. In a special picket protesting her imprisonment, Phoebe Scott Persons (1878–1959) of Montclair joined the group, and was among those arrested and taken to Occoquan. At Occoquan, the women experienced horrendous treatment including beating and confinement. The women demanded to be treated as political prisoners, as suffrage advocates were in Great Britain, or they refused to eat. Alice Paul and several other women were force-fed, a shockingly violent procedure where the prisoner was tied down, and a tube was forced through her nose, through which a thick liquid was poured. Force-feeding resulted in broken teeth, bleeding, vomiting, and choking on food going into suffragists’ lungs, and left many with chronic injuries from damage to tissues in the nose and throat. After the National Woman’s Party took legal action, all the women were released in late November.

NJWSA continued to distance itself from the National Woman’s Party’s activities.

Instead, NJWSA continued its strategy of winning friends through supporting the war effort. In October 1917, NJWSA began its major war-related project, a soldiers’ club at the newly-opened Camp Dix training camp in Wrightstown, New Jersey. Even though Wrightstown was fifty miles away, Middlesex County suffragists took their turn serving as hostesses at the club.