The Story of the Woman's PartyGillmore, Inez Haynes
History
The Story of the Woman's Party
Gillmore, Inez Haynes
National Woman's Party; Paul, Alice, 1885-1977; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
ALICE PAUL is a slender, frail-looking young woman, delicately colored
and delicately made. The head, the neck, the long slim arms, and the
little hands look as though they were cut out of alabaster. The dense
shadowy hair, scooping with deeper accessions of shadow into great
waves, dipping low on her forehead and massing into a great dusky bunch
in her neck, might be carved from bronze. It looks too heavy for her
head. Her face has a kind of powerful irregularity. Its prevailing
expression is of a brooding stillness; yet when she smiles, dimples
appear. Her eyes are big and quiet; dark—like moss-agates. When she is
silent they are almost opaque. When she talks they light up—rather they
glow—in a notable degree of luminosity. Her voice is low; musical; it
pulsates with a kind of interrogative plaintiveness. When you ask her a
question, there ensues, on her part, a moment of a stillness so
profound, you can almost hear it. I think I have never seen anybody who
can keep so still as Alice Paul. But when she answers you, the lucidity
of exposition, the directness of expression! Always she looks you
straight in the eye, and when she has finished speaking she holds you
with that luminous glow. Her tiny hands make gestures, almost humorous
in their gentleness and futility, compared with the force of her
remarks.
In the endless discussions at Headquarters—discussions that consider
every subject on earth and change constantly in personnel and point of
view—she is always the most silent. But when at last she speaks, often
there ensues a pause; she has summed it all up. Superficially she seems
cold, austere, a little remote. But that is only because the fire of her
spirit burns at such a heat that it is still and white. She has the
quiet of the spinning top.
As for her mentality ... her capacity for leadership ... her vision....
There is no difference of opinion in regard to Alice Paul in the Woman’s
Party. With one accord, they say, “She is the Party.” They regard her
with an admiration which verges on awe. Mentally she walks apart; not
because she has any conscious sense of superiority, but because of the
swiftness, amplitude, and completeness with which her mind marches—her
marvelous powers of concentration and her blazing devotion to the work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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