Jailed for Freedom | Page 5

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
{12}
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
{13}
"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 the sole object of proving that we were wiser than she imagined. I had never discussed this point with anybody, as I had been in Washington only a few months and it had never occurred to me that we were not right to talk of getting the amendment in that particular session. But I answered my patronizing friend, in effect, that of course we were not fools, that we knew we would not get the amendment that session, but we saw no reason for not demanding it at once and taking it when we got it.
When Miss Paul saw the carbon of that letter she said quietly, pointing to the part where I had so nobly defended our sagacity,