The other read:
HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?
These were the first women to picket the White House.
The first picket line appeared on January 10, 1917; the last, over a year and a half later. Between those dates, except when Congress was not in session, more than a thousand women held lettered banners, accompanied by the purple, white, and gold tri-colors, at the White House gates, or in front of the Capitol. They picketed every day of the week, except Sunday; in all kinds of weather, in rain and in sleet, in hail, and in snow. All varieties of women picketed: all races and religions; all cliques and classes; all professions and parties. Washington became accustomed to the dignified picture—the pickets moving with a solemn silence, always in a line that followed a crack in the pavement; always a banner’s length apart; taking their stand with a precision almost military; maintaining it with a movelessness almost statuesque. Washington became accustomed also to the rainbow splash at the White House gates—“like trumpet calls,” somebody described the banners. Artists often spoke of the beauty of their massed color. In the daytime, those banners gilded by the sunlight were doubly brilliant, but at twilight the effect was transcendent. Everywhere the big, white lights—set in the parks on such low standards that they seemed strange, luminous blossoms, springing from the masses of emerald green shrubbery—filled the dusk with bluish-white splendor, and, made doubly colorful by this light, the long purple, white, and gold ribbon stood out against a background beautiful and appropriate; a mosaic on the gray of the White House pavement; the pen-and-ink blackness of the White House iron work; the bare, brown crisscross of the White House trees, and the chaste colonial simplicity of the White House itself.
With her abiding instinct for pageantry and for telling picturesqueness of demonstration, Alice Paul soon punctuated the monotony of the picketing by special events. Various States celebrated State days on the picket line. Maryland was the first of these, and the long line of Maryland women bearing great banners, extended along Pennsylvania Avenue the entire distance from the East gate to the West gate. Pennsylvania Day, New York Day, Virginia Day, New Jersey Day, followed. The Monday of every week was set aside finally for District of Columbia Day.
The New York delegation carried on their banners phrases from President Wilson’s book, The New Freedom.
LIBERTY IS A FUNDAMENTAL DEMAND OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.
WE ARE INTERESTED IN THE UNITED STATES, POLITICALLY