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
Monday morning, at 10 o’clock, Alice Paul telephoned the Executive
Office that, as it was impossible to find out what hour would suit the
convenience of the President, the delegation was on its way to the White
House. She explained that they would wait there until the President was
ready to receive them, or would definitely refuse to do so. The clerk at
the Executive Office declared over the telephone that it would be
impossible to see the President without an appointment. He assured Alice
Paul that such a thing had never been done. Representative McCoy called
up Headquarters, and reported his failure to secure an appointment. On
being told that the delegation was going to call on the President
anyway, he protested vehemently against its proceeding to the White
House without the usual official preliminaries. Alice Paul’s answer was
a single statement,—“The delegation has already started.”
In double file the seventy-three New Jersey women marched through
Fifteenth Street, through Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Treasury
Department, and up to the White House grounds. And, lo, as though their
coming spread paralyzing magic, everything gave way before them. Two
guards in uniform stood at the gate. They saluted and moved aside. The
seventy-three women marched unchallenged through the grounds to the door
of the Executive Office. An attendant there requested them courteously
to wait until after their two leaders should be presented to the
President by his Secretary.
The request that these seventy-three New Jersey women made to President
Wilson was that he should support the Constitutional Amendment
enfranchising women. President Wilson replied: “I am pleased, indeed, to
greet you and your adherents here, and I will say to you that I was
talking only yesterday with several Members of Congress in regard to the
Suffrage Committee in the House. The subject is one in which I am deeply
interested, and you may rest assured that I will give it my earnest
attention.”
It is to be seen that the President’s education had progressed—a little.
To previous delegations, he had stated merely that the tariff and
currency would take so much of the attention of Congress that there
would be no time for the Suffrage question. In advocating a Suffrage
Committee in the House, he had made an advance—tiny, to be sure, but an
advance.
* * * * *
In the last month of 1913 occurred in Washington the Forty-fifth Annual
Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The
Convention opened with a mass-meeting at the Columbia Theatre. Dr. Anna
Howard Shaw presided. Jane Addams and Senator Helen Ring Robinson were
the principal speakers. At the opening meeting of the Convention, Lucy
Burns repeated the warning of the Congressional Union to the Democratic
Party:
The National American Women Suffrage Association is assembled in
Washington to ask the Democratic Party to enfranchise the women of
America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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