As always, Mrs. Howe was kind and sympathetic. When I was telling her good-by, while she was still holding my hands, she asked me to give her another promise—to attend such a meeting at the State House at my earliest opportunity. That opportunity came while I was taking a graduate course at Radcliffe—Professor Baker’s course in playwriting.
Learning from the morning paper that the Suffrage Party was to make its annual appeal in the State House that afternoon, quite a little while after the appointed hour I drifted in. It was a long room with high ceiling, and I knew that the broad windows on the side facing the door by which I entered overlooked Charlestown and the Charles River.
That side, the Charles River side, was packed—every seat taken, and numbers of women standing against the wall. On the side next the door there were a good many vacant seats, and without giving the matter a thought, I took my place beside a woman, who, catching my eye, made room for me. There were several speeches for and against.
Then a little wisp of a woman got up. She had the face of a blighted new-born baby—wrinkled and old as the human race. And in her eyes there shone the patient acceptance of the curse: “The sins of the fathers shall be visited on their children, to the third and fourth generation.”
She was from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and had been working in the mills since she was ten years old. For years she had supported her delicate mother and her younger brothers and sisters. These younger ones, having been forced into the mills before they were strong enough, had sickened and dropped off like so many flies. So at last she was left the sole support of a bedridden mother.
She told of conditions in the mills, and I knew she spoke the truth. For it was soon after the notorious “Lawrence strike,” during which I had journeyed down from Cambridge and spent a week in the mill town. This ill-fed little feminine creature, who had never known a care-free day in her whole life, ended her statement with the appeal:
“Gentlemen, you tell me a woman’s place is the home. Ah, gentlemen, if I only had a home I’d be too glad to stay in it. I know you can’t give me a home—there are too many like me. But you can give me the ballot.” She bent toward the men on the rostrum, the law-makers. “Please give it to me,” she pleaded, her little voice so husky that it was hardly more than a hoarse whisper. “Please give me the ballot. Then I can vote, stand a chance of getting my work hours limited. You don’t let ’em work a horse day and night, gentlemen. Give me a horse’s chance. Give me the ballot, gentlemen.”
There may have been applause when she slipped back into her seat. But if so I was unconscious of it. My heart was like a throbbing, aching tooth in my bosom. Was there really a God in heaven?
Then across the aisle from the little woman a man stepped out. Such a man as would make you feel sure that at his birth his mother might have proclaimed with pride: “Behold, I have brought forth a man child; a man made in the image of his Maker.”
From the tips of his polished shoes to the crown of his waving iron-gray hair he personified “the best”—the best breed, the best care, the best food, the best education, the best fashion, always the best and only the best. The jewel in his scarf-pin or one of the rings on his hand would have made the puny factory worker comfortable for the balance of her days, would have given her a home.