Helen Todd, the Chairman, a grand person who had been trained under Jane Addams, had given the mothers of Brownsville places of honor on the platform to let everybody see what kind of women we were fighting for. She asked for twenty volunteers to follow the example of the English suffragettes who had gone on hunger strikes en masse, but no women whose names registered socially in the public mind were willing thus to join in protesting against the law; only working girls came forward.
Three days later Jessie Ashley and I took the train for Albany with Mrs. Pinchot, who was a close friend of Governor Charles S. Whitman, to ask him to appoint a commission to investigate birth control and make a report to the State Legislature. The Governor, who was fair and intelligent, quite distinctly representing a class of liberal politicians, received us cordially.
Ethel and her hunger strike had been front-page news for ten days; in the subway, on street corners, everywhere people gathered, she was being discussed. In Washington and Albany congressmen and legislators were sending out for the latest details. Governor Whitman naturally asked about her, and we seized the opportunity to try to impress on him the outrageousness of making her suffer for so just a cause. He said directly her incarceration was a disgrace to the State. He was entirely out of sympathy with the courts and judges, and offered a pardon conditional upon her ceasing to disseminate birth control information.
But I had not come to ask that favor.
“My sister wouldn’t take a pardon,” I replied, much to the distress of Mrs. Pinchot. However, I accepted gratefully his letter to the warden at Blackwell’s Island authorizing me to see her.
The next morning I appeared again before the court. During the three-day interim the effect of the mothers’ testimony had evidently been effaced from the judges’ minds, and they were infuriated by my Carnegie Hall denunciation. But far more detrimental to my hope of a new interpretation was the prosecution’s introduction of a Federal agent who had once confiscated a copy of Family Limitation in which was the picture of this same cervical cap; he read aloud my advice to women to use it as a means of preventing conception. Not even the most friendly judge could get away from the fact that I had intended a far broader definition than any permitted by the existing law.
The prosecution argued further that the constitutionality of Section 1142 could not be challenged, because the exception for physicians in Section 1145 already guaranteed “liberty” to citizens. And, since I was not a physician and consequently did not come under the exception, the court must, in any event, find me guilty. This they did.
The day had been so full that I was not able to avail myself of Governor Whitman’s permit to visit Ethel until evening, when Mr. and Mrs. Pinchot took me in their car to the Workhouse. I remember how cold it was; the trip on the ferry seemed to go on forever. But when we finally arrived, at the name of Pinchot, the friend of the Governor, doors swung open; officialdom turned polite and courteous and salaamed us on our way.
The Pinchots remained below while I was sent up to Ethel’s cell, where she was lying on her iron cot, dressed in readiness for her release. Her appearance shocked and horrified me. She had grown thin and emaciated, her eyes were sunken and her tongue swollen, high red spots stood out on her cheeks. She could not see me even across the narrow cell, knowing me only by my voice. Hers was muffled as she whispered me to come nearer, her mind confused. “Liberty,” she kept repeating, “I want my liberty.”
Her life was all that mattered to me now. I had to eat humble pie, and said to the matron I was going to telegraph Governor Whitman that she was too ill to accept the conditions of the pardon for herself, but I would promise on her behalf. I was told that he had already signed the pardon, was on his way to New York, and to wait downstairs, please.