The women were taken to the Charles Street Jail to serve their sentences. “The cells were immaculately clean,” said Miss Morey, “but there was one feature of this experience which obliterated all its advantages. The cells were without modern toilet facilities. The toilet equipment consisted of a heavy wooden bucket, about two and a half feet high and a foot and a half in diameter, half filled with water. No one of us will ever forget that foul bucket. It had to be carried to the lower floor—we were on the third and fourth floors—every morning. I could hardly lift mine off the floor, to say nothing of getting it down stairs (Miss Morey weighs 98 pounds), so there it stayed. Berry Pottier managed to get hers down, but was so exhausted she was utterly unable to get it back to her cell.
“The other toilet facility provided was a smaller bucket of water to wash in, but it was of such a strangely unpleasant odor that we did not dare use it.”
The Boston reporters were admitted freely—and they wrote columns of copy. There was the customary ridicule, but there were friendly light touches such as, “Militant Highlights—To be roommates at Vassar College and then to meet again as cellmates was the experience of Miss Elsie Hill and Mrs. Lois Warren Shaw.” . . . “Superintendent Kelleher didn’t know when he was in Congress with Elsie Hill’s father he would some day have Congressman Hill’s daughter in his jail.”
And there were friendly serious touches in these pages of sensational news—such as this excerpt from the front page of the Boston Traveler of February 25, 1919. “The reporter admired the spirit of the women. Though weary from loss of sleep, the fire of a great purpose burned in their eyes . . . .
“It was a sublime forgetting of self for the goal ahead, and whether the reader is in sympathy with the principle for which these women are ready to suffer or not, he will be forced to admire the spirit which leads them on.”
Photographs of the women were printed day by day—giving their occupations, if any, noting their revolutionary ancestors, ascertaining the attitude of husbands and fathers. Mrs. Shaw’s husband’s telegram was typical of the support the women got. “Don’t be quitters,” he wired, “I have competent nurses to look after the children.” Mr. Shaw is a Harvard graduate and a successful manufacturer in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Telegrams of protest from all over the country poured in upon all the Boston officials who had had any point of contact with the militants. All other work was for the moment suspended. Such is the quality of Mrs. Morey’s organizing genius that she did not let a solitary official escape. Telegrams also went from Boston, and especially from the jail, to President Wilson.
Official Boston was in the grip of this militant invasion when suddenly a man of mystery, one E. J. Howe, appeared and paid the women’s fines. It was later discovered that the mysterious E. J. Howe alleged to have acted for a “client.” Whether the “client” was a part of Official Boston, no one ever knew. There were rumors that the city wished to end its embarrassment.
Sedate Boston had been profoundly shaken. Sedate Boston gave more generously than ever before to militant finances. And when the “Prison Special” arrived a few days later a Boston theatre was filled to overflowing with a crowd eager to hear more about their local heroines, and to cheer them while they were decorated with the already famous prison pin.
Something happened in Washington, too, after the President’s safe journey thither from Boston.