Jailed for Freedom | Page 5

it down on paper, I realize how little
we know about this laconic person, and yet how abundantly we feel her
power, her will and her compelling leadership. In an instant and vivid
reaction, I am either congealed or inspired; exhilarated or depressed;
sometimes even exasperated, but always moved. I have seen her very
presence in headquarters change in the twinkling of an eye the mood of
fifty people. It is not through their affections
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that she moves them, but through a naked force, a vital force which is
indefinable but of which one simply cannot be unaware. Aiming
primarily at the intellect of an audience or an individual, she almost
never fails to win an emotional allegiance.
I shall never forget my first contact with her. I tell it here as an
illustration of what happened to countless women who came in touch
with her to remain under her leadership to the end. I had come to
Washington to take part in the demonstration on the Senate in July,
1913, en route to a muchneeded, as I thought, holiday in the
Adirondacks.
"Can't you stay on and help us with a hearing next week?" said Miss
Paul.
"I'm sorry," said I, "but I have promised to join a party of friends in the
mountains for a summer holiday and . . ."
"Holiday?" said she, looking straight at me. Instantly ashamed at
having mentioned such a legitimate excuse, I murmured something
about not having had one since before entering college.
"But can't you stay?" she said.

I was lost. I knew I would stay. As a matter of fact, I stayed through the
heat of a Washington summer, returned only long enough at the end of
the summer to close up my work in state suffrage and came back to join
the group at Washington. And it was years before I ever mentioned a
holiday again.
Frequently she achieved her end without even a single word Of retort.
Soon after Miss Paul came to Washington in 1913, ;she went to call on
a suffragist in that city to ask her to donate ;some funds toward the rent
of headquarters in the Capital. The woman sighed. "I thought when
Miss Anthony died," she said, "that all my troubles were at an end. She
used to come to me for money for a federal amendment and I always
told her it was wrong to ask for one, and that besides we would never
get it. But she kept right on coming. Then when she died we
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didn't hear any more about an amendment. And now you come again
saying the same things Miss Anthony said."
Miss Paul listened, said she was sorry and departed. Very shortly a
check arrived at headquarters to cover a month's rent.
A model listener, Alice Paul has unlimited capacity for letting the other
person relieve herself of all her objections without contest. Over and
over again I have heard this scene enacted.
"Miss Paul, I have come to tell you that you are all wrong about this
federal amendment business. I don't believe in it. Suffrage should come
slowly but surely by the states. And although I have been a life-long
suffragist, I just want to tell you not to count on me, for feeling as I do,
I cannot give you any help."
A silence would follow. Then Miss Paul would say ingenuously, "Have
you a half hour to spare?"
"I guess so," would come slowly from the protestant. “Why?”

"Won't you please sit down right here and put the stamps on these
letters? We have to get them in the mail by noon."
"But I don't believe …”
"Oh, that's all right. These letters are going to women probably a lot of
whom feel as you do. But some of them will want to come to the
meeting to hear our side."
By this time Miss Paul would have brought a chair, and that ended the
argument. The woman would stay and humbly proceed to stick on
endless stamps. Usually she would come back, too, and before many
days would be an ardent worker for the cause against which she
thought herself invincible.
Once the state president of the conservative suffrage forces in Ohio
with whom I had worked the previous year wrote me a letter pointing
out what madness it was to talk of winning the amendment in Congress
"this session," and adding that
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"nobody but a fool would ever think of it, let alone speak of it
publicly." She was wise in politics; we were nice, eager, young girls,
but pretty ignorant-that was the gist of her remonstrance. My vanity
was aroused. Not wishing to be called "mad" or "foolish" I sat down
and answered her in a friendly spirit, with