The Story of the Woman's Party

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

At a meeting of the Advisory Council in New York City on Wednesday, March 31, she outlined plans for the coming year. She said in part:

We want to organize in every State in the Union. We will begin this by holding in each State a Convention on the same lines as this Conference, at which we will explain our purposes, our plans, and our ideals. At each of these Conferences, the members will select a State Chairman, who will appoint a Chairman of each of the Congressional constituencies in her State. Each Convention will also adopt a plan of State organization, suited to the needs of their locality. Each Convention too will send Representatives to a culminating Convention of women voters, to be held at San Francisco during the course of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, on September 14th, 15th, and 16th. At this first Convention of women voters to be held on their own territory in behalf of the National Suffrage Amendment, delegates will be appointed to go to Washington, D. C., the week Congress opens, to lay before their Representatives and the leaders of the majority Party in Congress, the demand of women voters for the national enfranchisement of women. During the opening week in Congress, too, the pageant on the life of Susan B. Anthony, along the lines which Hazel Mackaye has just outlined to you, will be given. We want to make Woman Suffrage the dominant political issue from the moment Congress reconvenes. We want to have Congress open in the midst of a veritable Suffrage cyclone.

During the Sixty-third Congress, we have been able, with very little organized support, to force action on the Federal Suffrage Amendment. When we have an active body of members in every State in the Union uniting in this demand, I believe that we will be able to get our Amendment passed.

The organization of the various State Conventions progressed rapidly from week to week. An incredible amount of work was done—and done with the swift, broad, slashing strokes which always characterized the Congressional Union work. This, of course, brought the Congressional Union into prominence everywhere; but the eye of the country was held by a new type of demonstration which, following her genius for picturesque publicity, Alice Paul immediately began to produce. The stage was the entire United States of America, and the leading woman in the—one would almost call it a pageant—was Sara Bard Field of California. The prologue opened at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915.

Through Mrs. Kent an exhibit booth for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage was secured in the Educational Building at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. The Record of the Sixty-third Congress was exhibited there, and the people in charge invited detailed inspection from visitors. All American visitors were asked to look up the record of their Congressman, to discover how he voted on the Suffrage Amendment: they were asked to sign the monster petition to Congress. This booth, always decorated with purple, white, and gold, was to become during the year the scene of meeting after meeting; all characterized by the picturesqueness which would inevitably emerge from a combination of the Congressional Union with California.

Sara Bard Field, in the Suffragist of September 11, thus describes it:

A world passes by. It looks reverently at the firmly-sweet face of Susan B. Anthony, whose portrait hangs upon the wall. It scans the record of the vote of the Sixty-third Congress.... It peers with curious smiles at the brief array of lady dolls which mutely proclaim the voting and non-voting States for women, and the forces which prevent Suffrage....

The first California Conference of the Congressional Union was held in San Francisco June 1 and 2. Every part of the State and every political Party was represented at the gathering. Florence Kelley, National Secretary of the Consumers’ League, appealed to the women of the West for aid in the battle of Eastern women for Suffrage in the following eloquent words:

I come from a State in which women have been trying to get Suffrage for twenty-seven years. We are forced to come to you women of California and ask you to stand behind us; and we are thankful that California has re-enlisted for Suffrage. Women in California have talked to me about the ease with which they won Suffrage, and praise their men-folk. I would like to say there was nothing the matter with my father. He was a Suffragist. There is nothing the matter with our men in the State of New York. Our trouble is with the steerage. They inundate our shores year after year. We slowly assimilate and convert; but each year there is the same work to do over—the same battle with ignorance and foreign ideas of freedom and the “place of woman.”

Mrs. Kelley gave instance after instance of the humiliation to which women working on the New York Suffrage petition had been put by naturalized foreign residents. She pointed out the curious, paradoxical inconsistency of granting foreigners the vote, and yet denying it to American women.