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
“But I am a voter,” Miss Younger, who is from California, would reply.
Their attitude invariably changed.
Miss Younger comments: “They _said_ they respected femininity, but it
was plain that they _did_ respect a voter.”
It was hard, hard work.
The lobbying was immensely more detailed and complicated than an
outsider would ever suspect. All the time, of course, they were working
for the passing of the Anthony Amendment. That was their great
objective, but, as in all warfare, the campaign for the great objective
was divided into many tiny campaigns. At the beginning of the
Congressional Union work in Washington, for instance, they lobbied
Senators and Representatives to march in the big parade of March 3,
1913. Later they lobbied them to go to mass-meetings, to attend
conventions. In 1916, when they were having such difficulty with the
Judiciary Committee, they lobbied Republicans and Democratic members of
that Committee to get them to act. By a follow-up system, they sent
other lobbyists in a few days to see if they had acted. When the
Suffrage Envoys came back from the West, they lobbied Congressmen to
receive them. In the Presidential election of 1916, they lobbied
Congress first to get Suffrage planks in both Party platforms and when
these planks proved unsatisfactory, they lobbied the Republican
Suffragists in Congress to get Hughes to come out for the Federal
Amendment and when Hughes came out for it, they lobbied the Democratic
Congressmen to get the President to come out for it. When the Special
War Session met, in April, 1917, fifty Woman’s Party lobbyists lobbied
Congress—covering it in a month. When the Irish Mission visited
Congress, and two hundred and fifty voted for the freedom of Ireland,
they lobbied these Congressmen to vote for the freedom of women. When
the arrests of the pickets began, they lobbied their Congressmen to go
to see their constituents in jail. The Woman’s Party kept track of how
Congressmen voted on different measures and wherever it was possible,
they linked it up with Suffrage. To the Congressmen who voted against
war, they sent lobbyists who could show what an influence for peace the
women could be. To those who voted for war, they sent the women, who
were war workers, to show how women could work for war.
Before the six years’ campaign of the Woman’s Party was over, the
Republicans were sometimes sending Congressmen of one State to convert
the unconverted ones of another, and, in the end, the young Democratic
Senators had actually appointed a committee to get Suffrage votes from
their older confrères. After Congress passed the Amendment, they lobbied
the Congressmen to write the governors to call special sessions of the
Legislature in the interests of ratification; then they lobbied them to
write the Legislators; then they lobbied them to write political
leaders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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