Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
The beans, hominy, rice, cornmeal (which is exceedingly coarse, like
chicken feed) and cereal have all had worms in them. Sometimes the
worms float on top of the soup. Often they are found in the cornbread.
The first suffragists sent the worms to Whittaker on a spoon. On the
farm is a fine herd of Holsteins. The cream is made into butter and
sold to the tuberculosis hospital in Washington. At the officers’ table
we have very good milk. The prisoners do not have any butter or sugar,
and no milk except by order of the doctor.
Prisoners are punished by being put on bread or water, or by being
beaten. I know of one girl who has been kept seventeen days on only
water this month in the “booby house.” The ,same was kept nineteen days
on water last year because she .beat Superintendent Whittaker when he
tried to beat her.
Superintendent Whittaker or his son are the only ones who beat the
girls. Officers are not allowed to lay a hand on them in punishment. I
know of one girl beaten until the blood had to be scrubbed from her
clothing and from the floor of the “booby house.” I have never actually
seen a girl beaten, but I have seen her afterwards and I have heard the
cries and blows. Dorothy Warfield was beaten and the suffragists heard
the beating.
(Signed) MRS. VIRGINIA BOVEE.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this day of disgust, 1917.
JOSEPH H. BATT, Notary Public.
While the Administration was planning an investigation of the
conditions in the workhouse, which made it difficult for women to
sustain health through a thirty day sentence, it was, through its
police court, sentencing more women to sixty day sentences, under the
same conditions. The Administration was giving some thought to its plan
of procedure, but not enough to master the simple fact that women would
not stop going to prison until something had been done which promised
passage of the amendment through Congress.
New forms of intimidation and hardship were offered by Superintendent
Whittaker.
Mrs. Frederick Kendall of Buffalo, New York, a frail and highly
sensitive woman, was put in a “punishment cell” on bread and water,
under a charge of “impudence.” Mrs. Kendall says that her impudence
consisted of “protesting to the matron that scrubbing floors on my
hands and knees was too severe work for me as I had been unable for
days to eat the prison food. My impudence further consisted in asking
for lighter work.”
Mrs. Kendall was refused the clean clothing she should have had the day
she was put in solitary confinement and was thus forced to wear the
same clothing eleven days. She was refused a nightdress or clean linen
for the cot. Her only toilet accommodations was an open pail. For four
days she was allowed no water for toilet purposes., Her diet consisted
of three thin slices of bread and three cups of water, carried to her
in a paper cup which frequently leaked out half the meager supply
before it got to Mrs. Kendall’s cell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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