You sentence us to jail for a few days, then you sentence us to the workhouse for thirty days, then sixty, and then you suspend sentence. Sometimes we are accused of carrying seditious banners, then of obstructing traffic. How do you expect us to see any consistency in the law, or in your sentences?
The Court smiled, and pronounced an additional thirty days, saying: “First, you will serve six months, and then you will serve one month more.”
Alice Paul had been in jail ever since October 20. When the news first got out, women came from all over the country to join the picket forces. It was decided that on November 10, forty-one women should go out on the picket line as a protest against her imprisonment. But on the night of November 9, these forty-one women—accompanied by sympathizers and friends—went down to the jail where their leader was confined. Headquarters had heard from Alice Paul from time to time, and Alice Paul had heard from Headquarters—by means of a cleaning-woman in the jail. In her Jailed for Freedom, Doris Stevens tells how she went down to the jail and talked to Alice Paul from the yard. Catherine Flanagan and Mrs. Sophie Meredith had communicated with her in this same manner. And once Vida Milholland came and sang under her window. But this was the first time that a deputation visited their imprisoned leader.
The house in which Warden Zinkham lived was close to the wing in which Alice Paul was imprisoned. The leader of the delegation, Katherine Morey, accompanied by Catherine Flanagan, went to Zinkham’s door and rang the bell; asked to see him. They were told that he was ill and could not be seen. Immediately, the two girls gave a prearranged signal to the silent crowd of pickets back of them. With one accord, they ran and grouped themselves under Alice Paul’s window. Before the guards could rush upon them and push them out of the yard, they had managed to call up to her their names; the large sum of money which that day had come into the Treasury; that forty-one of them would protest against her imprisonment on the picket line the next day.
The next morning, the picket line of forty-one women marched from Headquarters in five groups. The first was led by Mrs. John Winters Brannan.
As usual, the pickets bore golden-lettered banners. As usual, they bore purple, white, and gold flags. As usual, they walked slowly—always a banner’s length apart. They moved over to Pennsylvania Avenue; took up their silent statuesque position at the East and West gates of the White House.
The thick stream of government clerks, hastening with home-going swiftness, paused to look at them. Involuntarily they applauded the women when they were arrested. This happened almost immediately, the police hurrying the pickets into the line of waiting patrols. Suddenly the crowd raised a shout:
“There come some more!”