Jailed for Freedom | Page 9

women?" It was evident that this course had not
heretofore occurred to him.
"This subject will receive my most careful consideration," was
President Wilson's first suffrage promise.
He was given time to "consider" and a second deputation went to him,
and still a third, asking him to include the suffrage amendment in his
message to the new Congress assembling in extra session the following
month. And still he was obsessed with the paramount considerations of
"tariff" and "currency." He flatly said there would be no time to
consider suffrage for women. But the "unreasonable" women kept right
on insisting that the liberty of half the American people was paramount
to tariff and currency.
President Wilson's first session of Congress came together April 7th,
1913. The opening day was marked by the suffragists' second mass
demonstration. This time women delegates representing every one of
the 435 Congressional Districts in the country bore petitions from the
constituencies showing that the people "back home" wanted the
amendment passed. The delegates marched on Congress and were
received with a warm welcome and their petitions presented to
Congress. The same day the amendment which bears the name of
Susan B. Anthony, who drafted it in 1875, was reintroduced into both
houses of Congress.
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The month of May saw monster demonstrations in many cities and
villages throughout the country, with the direct result that in June the
Senate Committee on Suffrage made the first favorable report made by
that committee in twenty-one years, thereby placing it on the Senate
calendar for action.
Not relaxing the pressure for a day we organized the third great
demonstration on the last of July when a monster petition signed by
hundreds of thousands of citizens was brought to the Senate asking that
body to pass the national suffrage amendment. Women from all parts of
the country mobilized in the countryside of Maryland where they were
met with appropriate ceremonies-by the Senate Woman Suffrage
Committee. The delegation motored in gaily decorated automobiles to
Washington and went direct to the Senate, where the entire day was
given over to suffrage discussion.
Twenty-two senators spoke in favor of the amendment in presenting
their petitions. Three spoke against it. For the first time in twenty-six
years suffrage was actually debated in Congress. That day was historic.
Speeches? Yes. Greetings? Yes. Present petitions from their
constituencies? Gladly. Report it from the Senate Committee? They
had to concede that. But passage of the amendment? That was beyond
their contemplation.
More pressure was necessary. We appealed to the women voters, of
whom there were then four million, to come into action.
"Four million women voters are watching you," we said to Congress.
We might as well have said, "There are in the South Sea Islands four
million heathens."
It was clear that these distant women voters had no relation in the
senatorial mind to the realism of politics. We decided to bring some of
these women voters to Washington: Having failed to get the Senate to
act by August, we invited the Council of Women Voters to hold its
convention in Wash-

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ington that Congress might learn this simple lesson: women did vote;
there were four million of them; they had a voters' organization; they
cared about the enfranchisement of all American women; they wanted
the Senate to act; suffrage was no longer a moral problem; it could be
made a practical political problem with which men and parties would
have to reckon.
Voting women made their first impression on Congress that summer.
Meanwhile the President's "paramount issues"-tariff and currency- had
been disposed of. With the December Congress approaching, he was
preparing another message. We went to him again. This time it was the
women from his own home state, an influential deputation of
seventy-three women, including the suffrage leaders from all suffrage
organizations in New Jersey. The women urged him to include
recommendation of the suffrage resolution in his message to the new
Congress. He replied:
"I am pleased, indeed, to greet you and your adherents here, and I will
say to you that I was talking only yesterday with several members of
Congress in regard to a Suffrage Committee in the House. The subject
is one in which I am deeply interested, and you may rest assured that I
will give it my earnest attention."
In interesting himself in the formation of a special committee to sit on
suffrage in the House, the President was doing the smallest thing, to be
sure, that could be done, but he was doing something. This was a
distinct advance. It was our task to press on until all the maze of
Congressional machinery had been used to exhaustion. Then there
would be nothing left to do but to pass the amendment.
A fourth time that year the determination