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 first Headquarters consisted of one long basement room, partitioned
at the back into three small rooms of which two were storerooms, and one
Miss Paul’s office. This opened into a court. Later when the
_Suffragist_ was published, they had rooms upstairs; sometimes one,
sometimes more, according to their funds. By the first anniversary, they
had expanded to ten rooms. Later still, they had two whole floors.
Almost all the work was done by volunteers. All kinds of people worked
for them. Comparatively idle women of the moneyed class gave up
matinées, teas, and other social occasions; stenographers, who worked
all day long, labored until midnight. Anybody who dropped into
Headquarters for any purpose was put to work. Once a distinguished
lawyer from a western city called on business with Alice Paul.
“Would you mind addressing a few envelopes?” asked Alice Paul when the
business was concluded. The distinguished lawyer, whose own office was
of course manned by a small army of stenographers, smiled; but he took
off his coat and went to work.
Alice Paul’s swift, decisive leadership was accepted, unquestioningly.
Her word was immutable. One day an elderly woman was observed at a
typewriter, painfully picking at it with a stiff forefinger. It was
obvious that with a great expenditure of time and energy, she was
accomplishing nothing.
“Why are you doing that?” somebody asked curiously.
“Because Alice Paul told me to,” was the plaintive answer.
Most of the work was done in the big front room. The confusion of going
and coming of the volunteer workers; the noise of conflicting activity;
conversation; telephones; made concentrated thinking almost impossible.
The policeman on the beat said that a light burned in Headquarters all
night long. That was true. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns used to work far
into the morning because then, alone, were they assured of quiet. There
were times though when Alice Paul worked all day, all night and sitting
up in bed, into the next morning. She never lost time. Later when she
picketed the White House, she used to take a stenographer with her and
dictate while on picket duty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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