“We think of the coming feeding all day. It is horrible. The doctor thinks I take it well. I hate the thought of Alice Paul and the others if I take it well.”
“We still get no mail; we are ‘insubordinate.’ It’s strange, isn’t it; if you ask for food fit to eat, as we did, you are ‘insubordinate’; and if you refuse food you are ‘insubordinate.’ Amusing. I am really all right. If this continues very long I perhaps won’t be. I am interested to see how long our so-called ‘splendid American men’ will stand for this form of discipline.
“All news cheers one marvelously because it is hard to feel anything but a bit desolate and forgotten here in this place.
“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. God knows we don’t want other women ever to have to do this over again.”
There have been sporadic and isolated cases of hunger strikes in this country but to my knowledge ours was the first to be organized and sustained over a long period of time. We shall see in subsequent chapters how effective this weapon was.
Chapter 11
Administration Terrorism
The Administration tried in another way to stop picketing. It sentenced the leader, Alice Paul, to the absurd and desperate sentence of seven months in the Washington jail for “obstructing traffic.”
With the “leader” safely behind the bars for so long a time, the agitation would certainly weaken! So thought the Administration! To their great surprise, however, in the face of that reckless and extreme sentence, the longest picket line of the entire campaign formed at the White House in the late afternoon of November 10th. Forty-one women picketed in protest against this wanton persecution of their leader, as well as against the delay in passing the amendment. Face to face with an embarrassing number of prisoners the Administration used its wits and decided to reduce the number to a manageable size before imprisoning this group. Failing of that they tried still another way out. They resorted to imprisonment with terrorism.