The Story of the Woman's Party

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

The Suffragist, January 25, 1919.

In 1917 occurred the great leap forward in the activity of the Woman’s Party; in swift succession came the picketing; the burning of the President’s words; the Watchfires of Freedom. And Headquarters from 1917 on—as can be easily imagined—was a feverishly busy place. From the instant the picketing started, it grew electric with action. As for the work involved in making up the constant succession of picket lines——

It was not easy at an instant’s notice to find women who had the time to picket. But always there were some women willing to picket part of the time and some willing to picket all of the time. Mary Gertrude Fendall was in charge of this work. That her office was no sinecure is evident from the fact that on one occasion alone—that memorable demonstration of March 4, 1917—she provided a line of nearly a thousand. Of course, too, as fast as the women went to jail, other women had to be found to fill their places. In those days Miss Fendall lived at the telephone and between telephone calls, she wrote letters which invited sympathizers to come from distant States to join the banner-bearing forces. Those women who could always be depended on for picketing were, in the main, Party sympathizers living in Washington; Party workers permanently established at Headquarters; organizers come back suddenly from their regular work. But volunteers came too—volunteers from the District of Columbia and from all parts of the United States. In the winter, as has been before stated, picketing was a cold business. The women found that they had to wear a surprising amount of clothes—sweaters and coats, great-coats, mufflers, arctics and big woolly gloves. Many of the pickets left these extra things at Headquarters and the scramble to disengage rights and lefts of the gloves and arctics was one of the amusing details of the operation of the picket line. Banners took up space too; but they added their cheering color to the picture.

When the arrests began, the atmosphere grew more tense and even more busy. But just as—when trouble came—a golden flood poured into the Woman’s Party treasury, so volunteer pickets came in a steadily lengthening line. Anne Martin had said to the Judge who sentenced her: “So long as you send women to jail for asking for freedom, just so long will there be women willing to go to jail for such a cause.” This proved to be true. Volunteers for this gruelling experience continued to appear from all over the country. Mrs. Grey of Colorado, sending her twenty-two year old daughter, Nathalie, into the battle, said:

I have no son to fight for democracy abroad, and so I send my daughter to fight for democracy at home.

It interested many of the Woman’s Party members to study the first reactions of the police to the strange situation the picketing brought about. Most of the policemen did not enjoy maltreating the girls. Some of them were stupid and a few of them were brutal, but many of them were kind. They always deferred to Lucy Burns with an air of profound respect—Miss Lucy, they called her. But a curious social element entered into the situation. Large numbers of the women were well-known Washingtonians. The police were accustomed to seeing them going about the city in the full aura of respected citizenship. It was very difficult often, to know—in arresting them—what social tone to adopt.

Mrs. Gilson Gardner tells an amusing story of her first arrest. In the midst of her picketing, an officer suddenly stepped up to her. He said politely: “It is a very beautiful day.” She concurred. They chatted. He was in the meantime looking this way and that up the Avenue. Suddenly, still very politely, he said: “I think the patrol will be along presently.” Not until then did it dawn on Mrs. Gardner that she was arrested.

Later, when the Watchfires were going, Mrs. Gardner was again arrested while she was putting wood on the flames. There was a log in her arms: “Just a minute, officer,” she said, in her gentle, compelling voice, and the officer actually waited while she crossed the pavement and put the remaining log on the fire. Later, when Mrs. Gardner’s name was called in the court, she decided that she preferred to stand, rather than sit in the chair designated for the accused. The policeman started to force her down. Again she said, in the gentle, compelling tone: “Please do not touch me, officer!” and he kept his hands off her from that time forth.

Of course, the unthinking made the usual accusation that these women were doing all this for notoriety. That was a ridiculous statement, whose disproof was easy. The character and quality of the women themselves were its best denial. The women who composed the Woman’s Party were of all kinds and descriptions; they emerged from all ranks and classes; they came from all over the United States. The Party did not belong exclusively to women of great wealth and social position, although there were many such in its list of membership; and some of these belonged to families whose fortunes were internationally famous. It did not belong exclusively to working women, although there were thousands of them in its ranks; and these represented almost every wage-earning task at which women toil. It did not belong exclusively to women of the arts or the professions; although scores of women, many nationally famous and some internationally famous, lent their gifts to the furtherance of the work. It did not belong exclusively to the women of the home, although scores of wives left homes, filled with the beauty which many generations of cultivation had accumulated—left these homes and left children; and although equal numbers left homes of a contrasting simplicity and humbleness—left these homes and left children to go to jail in the interests of the movement. It may be said, perhaps, that the rank and file were characterized by an influential solidity, that they were women, universally respected in their communities, necessary to it. It was an all-woman movement. Indeed, often women who on every other possible opinion were as far apart as the two poles, worked together for the furtherance of the Federal Amendment. On one occasion, for instance, on the picket line, two women who could not possibly have found a single intellectual congeniality except the enfranchisement of women stood side by side. One was nationally and internationally famous as a conservative of great fortune. The other was nationally and internationally famous as a radical. In other words, one stood at the extreme right of conservatism and the other at the extreme left of radicalism. It was as though, among an archipelago of differing intellectual interests and social convictions, the Party members had found one little island on which they could stand in an absolute unanimity; stand ready to fight—to the death, if it were necessary—for that conviction.

Some of the stories which they tell at Headquarters to illustrate the Pan-woman quality of the Party are touchingly beautiful. There is the case, for instance, of a woman government clerk, self-supporting, a widow, and the mother of a little girl. Every day for weeks, she had passed that line of pickets standing silently at the White House gates. She heard the insults that were tossed to the women. She saw the brutalities which were inflicted on them. She witnessed arrests. Something rose within fluttered ... tore at her.... One day when Alice Paul was picketing, this young woman, suit-case in hand, appeared before her. She said “I am all ready to picket if you need me. I have made all the necessary arrangements in case I am arrested. Where shall I go to join your forces so that I may picket today?” She was arrested that afternoon and sent to prison.