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
I told about a syphilitic colored woman with one leg. The other one
was 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 boarding 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....
In regard to the forcible feeding, she said:
Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding. I was vomiting
continually during the process. The tube has developed an irritation
somewhere that is painful....
I fainted again last night. I just fell flop over in the bathroom
where I was washing my hands, and was led to bed, when I recovered,
by a nurse. I lost consciousness just as I got there again. I felt
horribly faint until twelve o’clock, then fell asleep for awhile....
The same doctor feeds us both.... Don’t let them tell you we take
this well. Miss Paul vomits much. I do, too, except when I’m not
nervous, as I have been every time but one. The feeding always gives
me a severe headache. My throat aches afterward, and I always weep
and sob, to my great disgust, quite against my will. I try to be
less feeble-minded.
The final barbarity, however, in the treatment of the pickets came out
in the experience of Alice Paul. Of course, the Administration felt that
in jailing Alice Paul, they had the “ringleader.” That was true. What
they did not realize, however, was that they had also jailed the
inspired reformer, the martyr-type, who dies for a principle, but never
bends or breaks. Miss Paul was arrested, it will be remembered, on
October 20. The banner that she carried had, in the light of later
events, a grim significance. It bore President Wilson’s own words:
THE TIME HAS COME TO CONQUER OR SUBMIT. FOR US THERE
CAN BE BUT ONE CHOICE. WE HAVE MADE IT.
Her sentence was seven months.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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