Deliberations continued. Details were settled. Three thousand dollars was raised in a few minutes among these women, fresh from the President’s rebuff. No one suggested waiting until the next Presidential campaign. No one even mentioned the fact that time was precious, and we could wait no longer. Every one seemed to feel these things without troubling to put them into words. Volunteers signed up for sentinel duty and the fight was on.
Part III
Militancy
“I will write a song for the President, full of menacing signs,
And back of it all, millions of discontented eyes.”
WALT WHITMAN
Chapter 1
Picketing a President
When all suffrage controversy has died away it will be the little army of women with their purple, white and gold banners, going to prison for their political freedom, that will be remembered. They dramatized to victory the long suffrage fight in America. The challenge of the picket line roused the government out of its half-century sleep of indifference. It stirred the country to hot controversy. It made zealous friends and violent enemies. It produced the sharply-drawn contest which forced the surrender of the government in the second Administration of President Wilson.
The day following the memorial deputation to the President, January 10th, 1917, the first line of sentinels, a dozen in number, appeared for duty at the White House gates. In retrospect it must seem to the most inflexible person a reasonably mild and gentle thing to have done. But at the same time it caused a profound stir. Columns of front page space in all the newspapers of the country gave more or less dispassionate accounts of the main facts. Women carrying banners were standing quietly at the White House gates “picketing” the President; women wanted President Wilson to put his power behind the suffrage amendment in Congress. That did not seem so shocking and only a few editors broke out into hot condemnation.
When, however, the women went back on the picket line the next day and the next and the next, it began to dawn upon the excited press that such persistence was “undesirable” . . . “unwomanly” …“dangerous.” Gradually the people most hostile to the idea of suffrage in any form marshaled forth the fears which accompany every departure from the prescribed path. Partisan Democrats frowned. Partisan Republicans chuckled. The rest remained in cautious silence to see how “others” would take it. Following the refrain of the press, the protest-chorus grew louder.
“Silly women” . . . “unsexed” . . .” pathological” . . . “They must be crazy” . . . “Don’t they know anything about politics?” . . . “What can Wilson do? He does not have to sign the constitutional amendment.” . . . So ran the comment from the wise elderly gentlemen sitting buried in their cushioned chairs at the gentlemen’s club across the Park, watching eagerly the “shocking,” “shameless” women at the gates of the White House. No wonder these gentlemen found the pickets irritating! This absorbing topic of conversation, we are told, shattered many an otherwise quiet afternoon and broke up many a quiet game. Here were American women before their very eyes daring to shock them into having to think about liberty. And what was worse—liberty for women. Ah well, this could not go on,—this insult to the President. They could with impunity condemn him and gossip about his affairs. But that women should stand at his gates asking for liberty—that was a sin without mitigation.
Disapproval was not confined merely to the gentlemen in their Club. I merely mention them as an example, for they were our neighbors, and the strain on them day by day, as our beautiful banners floated gaily out from our headquarters was, I am told, a heavy one.