We tried very hard to sleep and forget our hunger and weariness. But all the night through our dusky comrades padded by to the lavatory, and in the streak of bright light which shot across the center of the room, startled heads could be seen bobbing up in the direction of a demented woman in the end cot. Her weird mutterings made us fearful. There was no sleep in this strange place.
Our thoughts turn to the outside world. Will the women care? Will enough women believe that through such humiliation all may win freedom? Will they believe that through our imprisonment their slavery will be lifted the sooner? Less philosophically, will the government be moved by public protest? Will such protest come?
The next morning brought us a visitor from suffrage headquarters. The institution hoped that the visitor would use her persuasion to make us pay our fines and leave and so she was admitted. We learned the cheering news, that immediately after sentence had been pronounced by the Court, Dudley Field Malone had gone direct to the White House to protest to the President. His protest was delivered with heat. The President said that he was “shocked” at the sixty day sentence, that he did not know it had been done, and made other evasions. Mr. Malone’s report of his interview with the President is given in full in a subsequent chapter.
Following Mr. Malone, Mr. J. A. H. Hopkins went to the White House. “How would you like to have your wife sleep in a dirty workhouse next to prostitutes?” was his direct talk to the President. Again the President was “shocked.” No wonder! Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins had been the President’s dinner guests not very long before, celebrating his return to power. They had supported him politically and financially in New Jersey. Now Mrs. Hopkins had been arrested at his gate and thrown into prison.
In reporting the interview, Mr. Hopkins said:
“The President asked me for suggestions as to what might be done, and I replied that in view of the seriousness of the present situation the only solution lay in immediate passage of the Susan B. Anthony amendment.”
Gilson Gardner also went to the White House to leave his hot protest. And there were others.
Telegrams poured in from all over the country. The press printed headlines which could not but arouse the sympathy of thousands. Even people who did not approve of picketing the White House said, “After all, what these women have done is certainly not ‘bad’ enough to merit such drastic punishment”
And women protested. From coast to coast there poured in at our headquarters copies of telegrams sent to Administration leaders. Of course not all women by any means had approved this method of agitation. But the government’s action had done more than we had been able to do for them. It had made them feel sex-conscious. Women were being unjustly treated. Regardless of their feelings about this particular procedure, they stood up and objected.
For the first time, I believe, our form of agitation began to seem a little more respectable than the Administration’s handling of it. But the Administration did not know this fact yet.