Those two women were Emily Perry and Jeannette Rankin.
The lobbying for the Woman’s Party was directed at first by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. Mrs. Gilson Gardner was the pioneer lobbyist, and the first-year lobbyists were all women voters. They made reports to Alice Paul and Lucy Burns every day. First these were oral; later they were written. This was the nucleus of the Woman’s Party card catalogue which has since become so famous. Finally, these written reports were put in tabulated form by Mrs. Grimes of Michigan.
As the work grew, unenfranchised women lobbied as often as enfranchised. The early lobbyists were: Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Mrs. William Kent, Mrs. George Odell, Lucy Burns, Abby Scott Baker, Mrs. Lowell Mellett. But not only the experienced lobbied. As has before been set down—following that wise instinct which impelled Alice Paul to give her workers glimpses of all phases of the movement—as fast as the organizers came back to Washington, she sent them up to the galleries of Congress to listen; she made them lobby for a while. And, as has elsewhere been stated, this was found to be a mutual benefit. Organizers took the temper and atmosphere of Congress back to the States, and sometimes to the very constituents of the Congressmen with whom they had talked; they put Congressmen in touch with what was happening at home. Whenever a woman visiting Washington called at Headquarters, Alice Paul immediately sent her to the Capitol to lobby the Congressmen and Senators of her own State.
In November, 1915, Anne Martin, as Chairman of the Legislative Department, became the head of the lobbying. Miss Martin is a born general. She brought to this situation an instinct for the strategy and tactics of politics. She supervised the work of those who were under her, sent them up to Congress with specific directions; received their reports; collated them; made suggestions for the next day’s work; developed a closer relation with the constituents and kept local chairmen in touch with the States of their own Congressmen and Senators. In 1916, Anne Martin ran for Senator in Nevada. She had of necessity to relinquish active work in Washington for the Woman’s Party.
In the spring of 1916, therefore, Maud Younger who was in a position to give her whole time to it, became Chairman of the Lobby Committee and chief lobbyist for the Amendment.
At all times this work was hard, and sometimes intensely disagreeable. Maud Younger in her Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist, gives some of the actual physical strain. She says:
The path of the lobbyist is a path of white marble. And white marble, though beautiful, is hard. The House office building runs around four sides of a block, so that when you have walked around one floor, you have walked four blocks on white marble. When you have walked around each of the five floors you have walked a mile on white marble. When you have gone this morning and afternoon through several sessions of Congress you have walked more weary miles on white marble than a lobbyist has time to count.
But the Woman’s Party lobbyists were not balked by the mere matter of white marble. In a week they were threading that interminable intricate maze of Congressional alleys with the light, swift step of familiarity and of determination. All day long, they drove from the Visitors’ Reception Room to Senatorial offices, and from Senatorial offices back to the Visitors’ Reception Room. They flew up and down in the elevators. They found unknown and secret stairways by which they made short cuts. They journeyed back and forth in the little underground subway which tries to mitigate these long distances. At first Congressmen frankly took to hiding, and the lobbyist discovered that the Capitol was a nest of abris, but in the end, even Congressmen could not elude the vigilance of youth and determination. As for the mental and spiritual difficulties of the task—at first, Senators and Congressmen were frankly uninterested, or, more concretely, irritated and enraged with the Suffrage lobbyists. It is not pleasant to have to talk to a man who does not want to hear you. The lobbyists had to learn to be quiet; deferential; to listen to long intervals of complaint and abuse; to seem not to notice rebuffs; to go back the next day as though the rebuff had not occurred. This is not easy to women of spirit. Perhaps it could not have been borne, if it had not been a labor of love. Many times these women had to bolster a smarting sense of humiliation by keeping the thought of victory in sight.
In her Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist, Maud Younger tells interestingly and with a very arch touch some of these experiences: