Jailed for Freedom

by Doris Stevens

Dead silence. The President stands for a brief instant at the end of his words as if waiting for some faint stir of approval which does not come. He has the baffled air of a dis- appointed actor who has failed to “get across.” Then he turns abruptly on his heel and the great doors swallow him up. Silently the women file through the corridor and into the fresh air.

The women returned to the spacious headquarters across the park all of one mind. How little the President knew about women! How he underestimated their intelligence and penetration of things political,! Was it possible that he really thought these earnest champions of liberty would merely carry resolutions of sorrow and regret to the President?

But this was not the real irony. How lightly he had shifted the responsibility for getting results to his party. With what coldness he had bade us “concert opinion,” a thing which he alone could do. That was pretty hard to bear, coming as it did when countless forms of appeal had been exhausted by which women without sufficient power could “concert” anything. The movement was almost at the point of languishing so universal was the belief in the nation that suffrage for women was inevitable. And yet he and his party remained immovable.

The three hundred women of the memorial deputation became on their return to headquarters a spirited protest meeting.

Plans of action in the event the President refused to help had been under consideration by Miss Paul and her executive committee for some time, but they were now presented for the first time for approval. There was never a more dramatic moment at which to ask the women if they were ready for drastic action.

Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a powerful leader of women, voiced the feeling of the entire body when she said, in a ringing call for action:

“We have gone to Congress, we have gone to the President during the last four years with great deputations, with small deputations. We have shown the interest all over the country in self-government for women—something that the President as a great Democrat ought to understand and respond to instantly. Yet he tells us to-day that we must win his party. He said it was strange that we did not see before election that his party was more favorable to us than the Republican party. How did it show its favor? How did he show his favor today to us? He says we have got to convert his party . . . Why? Never before did the Democratic Party lie more in the hands of one man than it lies to-day in the hands of President Wilson. Never did the Democratic Party have a greater leader, and never was it more susceptible to the wish of that leader, than is the Democratic Party of to-day to President Wilson. He controls his party, and I don’t think he is too modest to know it. He can mould it as he wishes and he has moulded it. He moulded it quickly before election in the matter of the eight-hour law. Was that in his party platform? He had to crush and force his party to pass that measure. Yet he is not willing to lay a finger’s weight on his party to-day for half the people of the United States . . . . Yet to-day he tells us that we must wait more—and more.

“We can’t organize bigger and more influential deputations. We can’t organize bigger processions. We can’t, women, do anything more in that line. We have got to take a new departure. We have got to keep the question before him all the time. We have got to begin and begin immediately.

“Women, it rests with us. We have got to bring to the President, individually, day by day, week in and week out, the idea that great numbers of women want to be free, wall be free, and want to know what he is going to do about it.

“Won’t you come and join us in standing day after day at the gates of the White House with banners asking, ‘What will you do, Mr. President, for one-half the people of this nation?’ Stand there as sentinels—sentinels of liberty, sentinels of self-government—silent sentinels. Let us stand beside the gateway where he must pass in and out, so that he can never fail to realize that there is a tremendous earnestness and insistence back of this measure. Will you not show your allegiance today to this ideal of liberty? Will you not be a silent sentinel of liberty and self-government?”