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
The Woman’s Party speakers took advantage of all kinds of situations. In
one town, Maud Younger found that a circus had arrived just ahead of
her. There was no adequate hall for a meeting; and so the circus men
offered her their tent; they even megaphoned her meeting for her. In
another town, a County Fair was being held. Maud Younger appealed to the
clowns to give her a chance to speak, and they let her have their
platform and the spot-light while they were changing costumes. In San
Francisco, Hazel Hunkins scattered thousands of leaflets from an
aeroplane flying over the city. Red Lodge, Montana, sent to the train,
which brought Abby Scott Baker to them, a delegation of members of the
Grand Army of the Republic, the leader bearing a large American flag.
They conducted her in state through the town to the hall where she was
to speak.
Perhaps no campaign was more interesting than that of Rose Winslow in
Arizona. Vivian Pierce, whose experienced newspaper hand on the
_Suffragist_ helped to make that paper the success it so swiftly became,
thus describes her work:
Rose Winslow represented the workers. She spoke for the exploited
women in Eastern industry. In her own person to her audiences she
typified her story of those imprisoned in factories and slums,
unable to fight their own battles. Her words had the authenticity of
an inspired young evangelist. She herself had come up out of that
darkness; and the men of the mines and lumber camps, the women of
the remote Arizona towns, listened to her with tears pouring down
their faces. One does not see Eastern audiences so moved. At Winslow
... this girl, pleading for working women, the most exploited class
in industry, appealed to the men of the great Santa Fé railroad
shops that animate the life of that remote region on the edge of the
“Painted Desert.” Rose Winslow had been warned that if she spoke at
this town, she would be “mobbed” by the Wilson Democrats. After her
impassioned story, told one noon hour, the men of the shops crowded
around this young woman from the East, “one of our own people,” as
one man said, and asked her what they could do for the women of the
East....
In the remote copper camps around Jerome and Bisbee, the story of
the industrial workers who have merely asked for a chance to help
themselves, made a deep impression on the foreign-born voters of
this section. There were Poles, Finns, and Lithuanians in the great
audience held in that copper town that is the working-man’s annex to
Bisbee. That audience both laughed and cried with Rose Winslow, and
then crowded around to greet her in her own language.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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