Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
“If this thing is necessary we will naturally go through with it. Force
is so stupid a weapon. I feel so happy doing my bit for decency-for our
war, which is after all, real and fundamental.”
“The women are all so magnificent, so beautiful. Alice Paul is as thin
as ever, pale and large-eyed. We have been in solitary for five weeks.
There is nothing to tell but that the days go by somehow. I have felt
quite feeble the last few days—faint, so that I could hardly get my
hair brushed, my arms ached so. But to-day I am well again. Alice Paul
and I talk back and forth though we are at opposite ends of the
building and, a hall door also shuts us apart. But
occasionally—thrills—we escape from behind our iron-barred doors and
visit. Great laughter and rejoicing!”
To her husband:—
“My fainting probably means nothing except that I am not strong after
these weeks. I know you won’t be alarmed.
“I told about a syphilitic colored woman with one leg. The other one
cut off, having rotted so that it was alive with maggots when she came
in. The remaining one is now getting as bad. They are so short of
nurses that a little colored girl of twelve, who is here waiting to
have her tonsils removed, waits on her. This child and two others share
a ward with a syphilitic child of three or four years, whose mother
refused to have it at home. It makes you absolutely ill to see it. I am
going to break all three windows as a protest against their confining
Alice Paul with these!
“Dr. Gannon is chief of a hospital. Yet Alice Paul and I found we had
been taking baths in one of the tubs here, in which this syphilitic
child, an incurable, who has his eyes bandaged all the time, is also
bathed. He has been here a year. Into the room where he lives came
yesterday two children to be operated on for tonsillitis. They also
bathed in the same tub. The syphilitic woman has been in that room
seven months. Cheerful mixing, isn’t it? The place is alive with
roaches, crawling all over the walls, everywhere. I found one in my bed
the other day . . . .”
“There is great excitement about my two syphilitics. Each nurse is
being asked whether she told me. So, as in all institutions where an
unsanitary fact is made public, no effort is made to make the wrong
itself right. All hands fall to, to find the culprit, who made it
known, and he is punished.”
“Alice Paul is in the psychopathic ward. She dreaded forcible feeding
frightfully, and I hate to think how she must be feeling. I had a
nervous time of it, gasping a long time afterward, and my stomach
rejecting during the process. I spent a bad, restless night, but
otherwise I am all right. The poor soul who fed me got liberally
besprinkled during the process. I heard myself making the most hideous
sounds . . . . One feels so forsaken when one lies prone and people
shove a pipe down one’s stomach.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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