The Susan B. Anthony Amendment, at the request of the Congressional Union, was introduced in the Senate on December 7 by Senator Sutherland of Utah and in the House on December 6 by Representative Mondell of Wyoming. Other members introduced the identical measure the same day. In the Senate, it was referred to the Committee on Woman Suffrage and in the House to the Judiciary Committee.
On December 16 occurred a Suffrage hearing before the Judiciary Committee. It will be remembered that this was the first hearing since the Congressional Union had campaigned against the Democratic Party. It was one of the most stormy in the history of the Congressional Union. Later a Republican Congressman referred to it, not as the “hearing,” but as the “interruption.” The storm did not break until after two hours in which the speakers of the other Suffrage Association had been heard, and the following members of the Congressional Union: Mrs. Andreas Ueland, Jennie C. Law Hardy, Florence Bayard Hilles, Mabel Vernon, all introduced by Alice Paul.
At this point, there occurred among the Democratic members of the Committee a sudden meeting of heads, a disturbed whispering. To informed lookers-on, it became evident that it had just dawned on them that the pale, delicate, slender slip of a girl in a gown of violet silk and a long Quakerish white fichu was the power behind all this agitation, that redoubtable Alice Paul who had waged the campaign of 1914 against them.
As Alice Paul rose to introduce one of the speakers, Mr. Taggart of Kansas interrogated her. It will be remembered that this was the Mr. Taggart whose majority had been diminished, by the Woman’s Party campaign, from three thousand to three hundred.
Mr. Taggart to Miss Paul: Are you here to report progress in your effort to defeat Democratic candidates?
Miss Paul: We are here to talk about this present Congress—this present situation. We are here to ask the Judiciary Committee to report this bill to the House.
Mr. Taggart: I take this occasion to say as a member of this committee that if there was any partisan organization made up of men who had attempted to defeat members of this committee, I do not think we would have given them a hearing. And if they had been men, they wouldn’t have asked it.
Miss Paul: But you hear members of the Republican Party and of the Prohibition Party.
Mr. Webb: They aren’t partisan. (Laughter).