The Story of the Woman's Party

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Notwithstanding the favorable report of the alienist, after a while they removed Alice Paul from the hospital to the psychopathic ward. The conditions under which she lived here are almost incredibly sinister. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was hoped that they would affect Alice Paul’s reason; would certainly discredit the movement she led by making the world believe that she was mentally unbalanced. The room in which she was confined was big and square, pleasant enough. It had two windows, one of which they boarded up. They took off the wooden door and replaced it with a grated door. All day long patients—mentally unbalanced—came to that door and peered in at her. All night long, shrieks rang in her ears. Just before dawn would come an interval of quiet, then invariably it was broken by the long, harrowing, ululating cries of a single patient who kept this up for hours.

One of the alienists told the nurse to keep Miss Paul under observation. This observation consisted of flashing a light in her face every hour all night long. This—naturally—brought her with a start out of her sleep. She averaged, she says, only a little sleep between flashes. Of course one cannot but think that if she had been trembling on the verge of insanity, this process would certainly have pushed her over the edge.

The women nurses were almost unfailingly kind and thoughtful. One carried her kindness to the point of saying once, “You know, I don’t think you are insane.” Alice Paul says, it was staggering to have people express their friendliness for you by assuring you that they thought you were in your right mind. The doctor who forcibly fed her protested against having to do it. She was kept in the psychopathic ward a week incommunicado. When it was discovered where she was, Dudley Field Malone got her removed back to the hospital. Of course the forcible feeding went on.

In the files at Headquarters, there are dozens of affidavits made by the women who went to jail for picketing. It is a great pity that they cannot all be brought to the attention of a newly enfranchised sex. More burningly than anything else, these affidavits would show that sex what work lies before them, as far as penal institutions are concerned. I quote but one of them—that of Ada Davenport Kendall—because it sums up so succinctly and specifically the things that the prison pickets saw.

I went into Occoquan Prison as a prisoner on September 13, 1917.

I went in with the idea of obeying the regulations and of being a reasonable prisoner.

While there I saw such injustice, neglect, and cruelty on the part of the officials that I was forced into rebellion.

During my thirty days’ imprisonment I saw that commissioners and other officials made occasional visits but that the people in charge were usually warned and used much deception on the occasion of these visits. Specially prepared food replaced the wormy, fermenting, and meager fare of ordinary days. Girls too frail to work were hurried off the scrubbing and laundry gangs, and were found apparently resting. Sick women were hidden. Girls were hurried out of punishment cells as the visitors proceeded through the buildings, and were hidden in linen rooms or rooms of matrons already inspected.

While there I was treated with indignities. I was insulted by loud-mouthed officials at every turn, was stripped before other women, stripped of all toilet necessities, warm underwear, and ordinary decencies, was deprived of soap, tooth-brush, writing materials, and sufficient clothing and bed coverings. I was dressed first in clean garments, but the officials later punished me by putting me in unclean clothing and into a filthy bed in which a diseased negress had slept. In the hospital I was obliged to use the toilet which diseased negro women used, although there was a clean unused toilet in the building.

With the four other women who were sentenced with me I was fed food filled with worms and vile with saltpeter; food consisting of cast-off and rotting tomatoes, rotten horse meat and insect-ridden starches. There were no fats: no milk, butter, nor decent food of any kind. Upon this fare I was put at hard labor from seven a.m. until five p.m., with a short luncheon out. We were not allowed to use the paper cups we had brought, but were forced to drink from an open pail, from common cups.