In the midst of any emergency such as a police raid or the stopping of a meeting my own emotions generally kept an even tenor; they did not go hopping up and down like a temperature. A nurse cannot afford to lose her head, and the control I had won in that training helped me, as did also my father’s philosophy, “Since all things change, this too will pass.”
Consequently, during this feverish period, neither public praise nor public blame affected me very much, although the type of criticism that came from friends was different. Just because they were friends and I wanted them to understand, I was unhappy if they did not. But, since persons one likes can have great influence and friendships take time, I refrained from making many new ones. Nevertheless, those I had then are as good today; when we meet we pick up the threads where we dropped them.
The War halted the progress of the birth control movement temporarily. The groups that had before been active now found new interests. The radicals were convulsed and their own ranks torn in two by the opposition to conscription. Influenza swept over the world and in its passage took off many of our old companions. Governor Whitman’s promised commission blew up. One bright bugle sounded when I learned that the section on venereal disease in What Every Girl Should Know, which had once been banned in the New York Call and for which Fania had been fined, was now, officially but without credit, reprinted and distributed among the soldiers going into cantonments and abroad. At home all felt there was little to do but wait until people came back to their senses; the Review was the only forward step I could take at the time.
Late in 1917 a new recruit was enlisted. Nobody ever knew Kitty Marion’s true name. She had been born in Westphalia, Germany, and when she was fifteen her father had whipped her once too often and she had run away to England, where eventually she had headed a turn at a music hall.
The London slums had aroused Kitty’s social conscience, and she had abandoned her own career to enroll with Mrs. Pankhurst in the suffrage crusade, becoming one of the most determined of her followers. When put in jail she set fire to her cell, chewed a hole in her mattress, broke the window, and upon being released threw bricks at Newcastle Post Office. Seven times she went to prison, enduring four hunger strikes and two hundred and thirty-two compulsory feedings, biting the hand that forcibly fed her. Since it was distasteful to the Government to have any suffragette die in prison, Kitty, under the so-called Cat-and-Mouse Act, was once released to a nursing home until she should have strength enough to return to confinement. Friends visited her there, exchanged clothes with her, and she escaped. On another occasion the Bishop of London personally begged her to give up her struggle. At the outbreak of war, the Pankhurst forces hustled her over to America rather than have her run the almost certain risk of deportation or internment.
Selling The Suffragette on the streets of London had been part of the initiation which duchesses and countesses and other noble auxiliaries to the Pankhurst cause had had to undergo. Kitty had stood side by side with them. Since we had so experienced a veteran ready for service we began to offer the Review on the sidewalks of New York. Our more sober supporters objected because they considered it undignified. But men and women from here, there, and everywhere passed through the commercial centers of New York, and this was a real means of reaching them.
All of us took a hand, but Kitty was the only one who stood the test of years. Strong, stoutish, tow-headed, her blue eyes bright and keen in spite of being well on in her fifties, she became a familiar sight. Morning, afternoon, and until midnight—workdays, Sundays, and holidays—through storms of winter and summer, she tried every street corner from Macy’s to the Grand Central Terminal. But her favorite stand was Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, right at Times Square. In her own words she was enjoying “the most fascinating, the most comic, the most tragic, living, breathing movie in the world.”
Many people still think I must be Kitty Marion. Everywhere they say to me, “I saw you twenty years ago outside the Metropolitan Opera House. You’ve changed so I wouldn’t know you.”
Street selling was torture for me, but I sometimes did it for self-discipline and because only in this way could I have complete knowledge of what I was asking others to do. In addition, I learned to realize what possible irritations Kitty had to encounter. Notwithstanding the insults of the ignorant, the censure of the bigots, she remained good-humored. They said to her, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought to be arrested, to be shot, to be in jail, to be hanged!” or, “It’s disgraceful, disgusting, scandalous, villainous, criminal, and unladylike!” When someone asked, “Have you never heard God’s word to ‘be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth’?” Kitty replied, “They’ve done that already,” and, knowing her Apocrypha as well as her Bible, retorted in kind, “Does it not say in Ecclesiasticus: 16; 1, ‘Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children’?”
During the War it was astonishing how many men, in and out of uniform, mistook Birth Control for British Control. “We don’t want no British Control here!” they exclaimed. Kitty would correct them, “Birth Control,” and someone would call, “Oh, that’s worse!”