Harriet Andrews, writing of her impressions of the jail in the Suffragist of January 25, says:
The jail was real. And it was not funny. I had a book of poetry to read, but I was sorry I hadn’t taken a volume from the works of the late Henri Fabre. It would have been interesting to study the habits of cockroaches. I lay on my straw pallet and watched them clustered in the upper right hand corner of my cell waiting for my light to be put out before they began their nightly invasion. And when my light went out, the bulb that still burned in the corridor enabled me to watch them crawling down in a long, uninterrupted line.... There were also other things that crawled.
The last group were sent to the old Workhouse in which Suffragists had been imprisoned the August before.
Of that Helena Hill Weed says in the Suffragist of February 22:
No fire had been built in the old Workhouse this winter until a few hours before we were imprisoned there. The dampness and cold of the first floor was quite unbearable. They permitted the women to sleep in the upper tier of cells, where the ventilation is better than on the ground floor where we were forced to sleep last summer. But these cells are too dark to stay in during the day, and the only other place is the cold, damp stone floor on the ground. The only fresh air in the prison enters the building through windows fifteen feet above the level of the floor where the women have to spend their waking hours. The warm air from the furnaces, which enters the building on the first floor immediately rises to the roof. The damp, icy winter air and all the noxious gases and foul odors sink to the floor, where the women have to sit. They are serving their imprisonment under practically cellar conditions. The authorities are not forcing us to drink the water in the pipes of the Workhouse this time, but are supplying fresh water.
Harriet Andrews said that in coming out, “the sense of air and light and space burst upon me like a shout.”
In the meantime, the Woman’s Party, carrying out its extraordinary thorough and forthright policy of publicity, had not failed to tell the country at large about all this. They sent throughout the United States a carfull of speakers; all women who had served sentences in prison. They were: Abby Scott Baker, Lucy Burns, Bertha Arnold, Mary Ingham, Mabel Vernon, Mrs. Robert Walker, Gladys Greiner, Mrs. A. R. Colvin, Ella Riegel, Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, Mrs. W. D. Ascough, Mary Winsor, Elizabeth McShane, Vida Milholland, Sue White, Lucy Ewing, Lucy Branham, Edith Ainge, Pauline Adams, Mrs. John Rogers, Cora Week, and Mary Nolan.
This car was called the Prison Special and the newspapers soon called the women the Prison Specialists. On the platform the speakers all wore duplicates of their prison costumes. Perhaps in all its history, the Woman’s Party has never gathered—not a more brilliant company of speakers—but speakers with so marvelous a story to tell. They spoke to packed houses. At their very first meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, traffic was actually stopped by the overflow meeting.