The great nervous strain came at meal time. All the women ate in one big room. The white women sat at one side. The meal lasted thirty and sometimes forty minutes. The food to us was not palatable, but we all tried to be sensible and eat enough to keep up our strength. The real problem, however, was not the food; it was the enforced silence. We were not allowed to speak in the dining-room, and after a conscientious effort to eat, the silent waiting was curiously unpleasant....
The use of the pencil is forbidden at all times. Each inmate is permitted to write but two letters a month, one to her family and one business letter. All mail received and sent is opened and read by one of the officials. Next to our longing for our own toilet articles was our desire for a pencil and a scrap of paper. Another rule which makes life in the Workhouse more difficult than life in the jail is that the Workhouse prisoners are not permitted to receive any food sent in from outside.
We found that the other prisoners were all amazed at the excessive sentences we had received. Old offenders, they told us, received only thirty days.
In the Suffragist of August 11, Doris Stevens, who was a member of the same group says:
No woman there will ever forget the shock and the hot resentment that rushed over her when she was told to undress before the entire company, including two negress attendants and a harsh-voiced wardress, who kept telling us that it was “after hours,” and they “had worked too long already today,” as if it were our fault that we were there. We silenced our impulse to resist this indignity, which grew more poignant as each woman nakedly walked across the great vacant space to the doorless shower....
“We knew something was goin’ to happen,” said one negro girl, “because Monday,” (we were not sentenced until Tuesday) “the clo’es we had on were took off us and we were given these old patched ones. We was told they wanted to take stock, but we heard they were being washed for you-all Suffragists.”
It will be remembered that this was that early group of pickets whom the President pardoned after the appeals of J. A. H. Hopkins, Dudley Field Malone, and Gilson Gardner. Before leaving they were taken to Superintendent Whittaker.
Asking for the attention of Miss Burns and the rest of them, he said:
“Now that you are going, I have something to say to you.” And turning to Miss Burns, he continued, “And I want to say it to you. The next lot of women who come here won’t be treated with the same consideration that these women were.”
Mrs. Virginia Bovee, an officer of Occoquan Workhouse, was discharged in September. At that time Lucy Burns filed charges with Commissioner Brownlow of the District of Columbia concerning conditions in the Workhouse. Evidence is submitted on Whittaker’s brutal treatment of other prisoners, but our concern must be with his treatment of the Suffragists.