Iris Calderhead; Vivian Pierce; Beulah Amidon; Lucy Branham; Hazel Hunkins; Clara Louise Rowe; Joy Young; Margery Ross; Mary Gertrude Fendall; Pauline Clarke; Alice Henkel; Rebecca Hourwich.
The third group consisted of:
Julia Emory; Betty Gram; Anita Pollitzer; Mary Dubrow; Catherine Flanagan.
The difficulties which lay in the path of the organizers cannot possibly be exaggerated: the work they accomplished cannot possibly be estimated. Their story is one of those sealed chapters in the history of feminism, the whole of which will never be known. With her usual astuteness Alice Paul always chose young, fresh, convinced, inspiring, and inspired spirits. Always she preferred enthusiasm to experience. Before an organizer left Headquarters for parts unknown, Alice Paul talked with her for several hours, going over her route, indicating the problems which would arise and—in her characteristic and indescribable Alice Paul way—suggesting how they were to be met; holding always above these details the shining object of the journey; managing somehow to fill her with the feeling that in spite of many obstacles, she would conquer all these new worlds. “No matter,” she always concluded, “what other Suffragists may say about us, pay no attention to it; go on with your work. Our fight is not against women.”
Sometimes these girls would come into towns where there not only existed no Suffrage organization but there had never been a Suffrage meeting. Sometimes they would have a list of names of people to whom to go for help; sometimes not that. At any rate they went to the best hotel and established themselves there. Then they found Headquarters, preferably in the hotel lobby; but if not there, in a shop window. Next they saw the newspapers. Inevitably it seemed—Alice Paul’s sure instinct never failed her here—they were incipient newspaper women. From the moment they arrived, blazing their purple, white, and gold, the papers rang with them, and that ringing continued until they left. They called on the women whose names had been given them, asked them to serve on a committee in order to arrange a meeting. At that meeting, to which National Headquarters would send a well-known speaker, the work would be explained, the aims of the Woman’s Party set forth, its history reviewed. When the organizer left that town, she left an organization of some sort behind her. Alice Paul always preferred, rather than a large, inactive membership, a few active women who, when needed, could bring pressure to bear from their State on Washington.
In the course of its history, the Woman’s Party has organized at some time in every State of the Union.
Whenever the organizers came back to Washington, Miss Paul always sent them to the Capitol to lobby for a while. This put them in touch with the Congressional situation. Moreover, Congressmen were always glad to talk with women who brought them concrete information in regard to the country at large, and particularly in regard to the Suffrage sentiment and the political situation in their own States, which they had often not seen for months. On the other hand, when the organizers embarked on their next journey, editors of small towns were always very grateful for the chance of talking with these informed young persons, who could bring their news straight from the national news-mint.
But one of the great secrets of Alice Paul’s success was that she freshened her old forces all the time, by giving them new work, brought new forces to bear all the time on the old work. If organizers showed the first symptoms of growing stale on one beat, she transferred them to another. Most of them performed at some time during their connection with the Woman’s Party every phase of its work. Perpetual change ... perpetual movement ... the onward rush of an exhilarating flood ... that was the feeling the Woman’s Party gave the onlooker.
I reiterate that it would be impossible to do justice, short of a book devoted entirely to their efforts, to these organizers. They turn up everywhere. They do everything! They know not fatigue! There is no end to their ingenuity and enthusiasm.
In spite of all this intensive thinking, and its result in action, the Congressional Union had its lighter moments, and many of them.