TO A COMRADE
Oh, you of the unquenchable spirit—
How I adore you!
I could light forever the waning fires of my courage
At the incessant, upleaping flame of your being!
You,—creature of light and color and vivid emotions—
Of radiant action,—who ever could dream of you passive,
Submissive, your small self stilled into lazy contentment?
You, fired with the beauty of ardor,
Lovely with love for all that is clean and earnest and forceful,
Yourself daring anything
So long as it be for Womanhood, and the cause of justice and progress—
Daring to lead and daring to follow—
Giving us each of your unfailing inspiration.
You, over whom the jeers and the mockings and the ugly thoughts
of those who understand not
Pass lightly, like a spent breath of foul air in a still cavern,
Unflicking the steadfast torch of you—
I could re-light forever the waning fires of my courage
At the incessant, upleaping flame of your being!
Elizabeth Kalb,
The Suffragist, January 25, 1919.

In 1917 occurred the great leap forward in the activity of the Woman’s Party; in swift succession came the picketing; the burning of the President’s words; the Watchfires of Freedom. And Headquarters from 1917 on—as can be easily imagined—was a feverishly busy place. From the instant the picketing started, it grew electric with action. As for the work involved in making up the constant succession of picket lines——

465It was not easy at an instant’s notice to find women who had the time to picket. But always there were some women willing to picket part of the time and some willing to picket all of the time. Mary Gertrude Fendall was in charge of this work. That her office was no sinecure is evident from the fact that on one occasion alone—that memorable demonstration of March 4, 1917—she provided a line of nearly a thousand. Of course, too, as fast as the women went to jail, other women had to be found to fill their places. In those days Miss Fendall lived at the telephone and between telephone calls, she wrote letters which invited sympathizers to come from distant States to join the banner-bearing forces. Those women who could always be depended on for picketing were, in the main, Party sympathizers living in Washington; Party workers permanently established at Headquarters; organizers come back suddenly from their regular work. But volunteers came too—volunteers from the District of Columbia and from all parts of the United States. In the winter, as has been before stated, picketing was a cold business. The women found that they had to wear a surprising amount of clothes—sweaters and coats, great-coats, mufflers, arctics and big woolly gloves. Many of the pickets left these extra things at Headquarters and the scramble to disengage rights and lefts of the gloves and arctics was one of the amusing details of the operation of the picket line. Banners took up space too; but they added their cheering color to the picture.

When the arrests began, the atmosphere grew more tense and even more busy. But just as—when trouble came—a golden flood poured into the Woman’s Party treasury, so volunteer pickets came in a steadily lengthening line. Anne Martin had said to the Judge who sentenced her: “So long as you send women to jail for asking for freedom, just so long will there be women willing to go to jail for such a cause.” This proved to be true. Volunteers for this gruelling experience continued to appear 466from all over the country. Mrs. Grey of Colorado, sending her twenty-two year old daughter, Nathalie, into the battle, said:

I have no son to fight for democracy abroad, and so I send my daughter to fight for democracy at home.

It interested many of the Woman’s Party members to study the first reactions of the police to the strange situation the picketing brought about. Most of the policemen did not enjoy maltreating the girls. Some of them were stupid and a few of them were brutal, but many of them were kind. They always deferred to Lucy Burns with an air of profound respect—Miss Lucy, they called her. But a curious social element entered into the situation. Large numbers of the women were well-known Washingtonians. The police were accustomed to seeing them going about the city in the full aura of respected citizenship. It was very difficult often, to know—in arresting them—what social tone to adopt.

Mrs. Gilson Gardner tells an amusing story of her first arrest. In the midst of her picketing, an officer suddenly stepped up to her. He said politely: “It is a very beautiful day.” She concurred. They chatted. He was in the meantime looking this way and that up the Avenue. Suddenly, still very politely, he said: “I think the patrol will be along presently.” Not until then did it dawn on Mrs. Gardner that she was arrested.

Later, when the Watchfires were going, Mrs. Gardner was again arrested while she was putting wood on the flames. There was a log in her arms: “Just a minute, officer,” she said, in her gentle, compelling voice, and the officer actually waited while she crossed the pavement and put the remaining log on the fire. Later, when Mrs. Gardner’s name was called in the court, she decided that she preferred to stand, rather than sit in the chair designated for the accused. The policeman started to force her down. Again she said, in the gentle, compelling tone: 467“Please do not touch me, officer!” and he kept his hands off her from that time forth.

Of course, the unthinking made the usual accusation that these women were doing all this for notoriety. That was a ridiculous statement, whose disproof was easy. The character and quality of the women themselves were its best denial. The women who composed the Woman’s Party were of all kinds and descriptions; they emerged from all ranks and classes; they came from all over the United States. The Party did not belong exclusively to women of great wealth and social position, although there were many such in its list of membership; and some of these belonged to families whose fortunes were internationally famous. It did not belong exclusively to working women, although there were thousands of them in its ranks; and these represented almost every wage-earning task at which women toil. It did not belong exclusively to women of the arts or the professions; although scores of women, many nationally famous and some internationally famous, lent their gifts to the furtherance of the work. It did not belong exclusively to the women of the home, although scores of wives left homes, filled with the beauty which many generations of cultivation had accumulated—left these homes and left children; and although equal numbers left homes of a contrasting simplicity and humbleness—left these homes and left children to go to jail in the interests of the movement. It may be said, perhaps, that the rank and file were characterized by an influential solidity, that they were women, universally respected in their communities, necessary to it. It was an all-woman movement. Indeed, often women who on every other possible opinion were as far apart as the two poles, worked together for the furtherance of the Federal Amendment. On one occasion, for instance, on the picket line, two women who could not possibly have found a single intellectual congeniality except the enfranchisement of women stood side by side. One was nationally and internationally 468famous as a conservative of great fortune. The other was nationally and internationally famous as a radical. In other words, one stood at the extreme right of conservatism and the other at the extreme left of radicalism. It was as though, among an archipelago of differing intellectual interests and social convictions, the Party members had found one little island on which they could stand in an absolute unanimity; stand ready to fight—to the death, if it were necessary—for that conviction.

Some of the stories which they tell at Headquarters to illustrate the Pan-woman quality of the Party are touchingly beautiful. There is the case, for instance, of a woman government clerk, self-supporting, a widow, and the mother of a little girl. Every day for weeks, she had passed that line of pickets standing silently at the White House gates. She heard the insults that were tossed to the women. She saw the brutalities which were inflicted on them. She witnessed arrests. Something rose within fluttered ... tore at her.... One day when Alice Paul was picketing, this young woman, suit-case in hand, appeared before her. She said “I am all ready to picket if you need me. I have made all the necessary arrangements in case I am arrested. Where shall I go to join your forces so that I may picket today?” She was arrested that afternoon and sent to prison.

Two other government clerks, who appeared on the picket line, were arrested and jailed. They appealed to the government authorities for a month’s leave of absence on the score of their imprisonment. All these three women, of course, ran the risk of losing their positions. But in their case the instinct to serve their generation was stronger than the instinct to conserve any material safety. It is pleasant to record that they were not compelled to make this sacrifice. Others, however, suffered. A school teacher in the Woman’s Party, for instance, lost her position because of her picketing.

If the foregoing is not denial enough of the charge, common 469when the picketing began, that these women were notoriety-seeking fanatics, perhaps nothing will bring conviction. It scarcely seems however that the most obstinate antagonist of the Woman’s Party would like to believe that delicately reared women could enjoy, even for the sake of notoriety—aside from the psychological effect of spiders and cockroaches everywhere, worms in their food, vermin in their beds, rats in their cells—the brutalities to which they were submitted. Yet many women who had endured this once, came back to endure it again and again.

One of the strong points of the Woman’s Party was its fairness. In reference to the President, for instance, Maud Younger used to say that the attitude of the Woman’s Party to him was like that of a girl who wants a college education. She teases her father for it without cessation, but she goes on loving him just the same. Another strong point of the Woman’s Party was its sense of humor on itself. They tell with great delight the amusing events of this period—of the grinning street gamin who stood and read aloud one of the banners, How long must women wait for liberty? and then yelled: “T’ree months yous’ll be waitin’—in Occoquan.”—of a reporter who, coming into Headquarters in search of an interview, found a child sliding down the bannisters. Before he could speak, the child announced in a tone of proud triumph: “My mother’s going to prison.”

A story they particularly like is of that young couple who, having had no bridal trip at the time of their marriage, came to Washington for a belated honeymoon. They visited Headquarters together. The bride became so interested in the picketing that she went out with one of the picket lines and was arrested. She spent her belated honeymoon in jail, and the groom spent his belated honeymoon indignantly lobbying the Congressmen of his own district.

Later, when they were lighting the Watchfires of Freedom 470on the White House pavement, the activity at Headquarters was increased one hundred-fold.

The pickets themselves refer to that period as the most “messy and mussy” in their history. Everything and everybody smelled of kerosene. All the time, there was one room in which logs were kept soaking in this pervasive fluid. When they first started the Watchfires they carried the urn and the oil-soaked logs openly, to the appointed spot on the pavement in front of the White House. Later, when the arrests began and the fires had to be built so swiftly that they had to abandon the urn, they carried these............