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 Congressional Union sent organizers into all the States of the Union
to make plans for the demonstration. Minnie E. Brooke went through every
State in the South. Mabel Vernon, one of the organizers for the
Congressional Union, traveled through the southwestern part of the
country and up through California, ending her trip in Nevada. Crystal
Eastman of the Executive Committee took care of the Northwestern States,
Emma Smith DeVoe covered the Far Western States; Jessie Hardy Stubbs,
the Middle Western States; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Alice Paul, assisted
by Olive Hasbrouck, New England and the Middle Atlantic States.
On February 12, the National American Woman Suffrage Association
promised its co-operation also, and from that date aided in making the
demonstration a success.
The demonstration—taking the form of parades in most cases, meetings in
a few—occurred in at least one great city in every State. The following
resolution was adopted at the various gatherings.
Resolved, that this meeting calls upon Congress to take immediate
and favorable action upon the Bristow-Mondell Resolution
enfranchising women.
The culminating demonstration occurred May 9 in Washington. There was a
mass-meeting at the Belasco Theatre, and following this a procession
starting promptly at three o’clock, marched to the Capitol. At the foot
of the Capitol steps, the enormous gathering sang the _Woman’s March_.
Then five hundred and thirty-one delegates representing every
Congressional and Senatorial district in the country, bearing
resolutions passed at the country-wide demonstrations, marched up the
long steps into the great Rotunda of the Capitol. A Committee of
Senators and Representatives awaited the delegates, received the
resolutions and introduced them on the floor of each House of Congress.
Here, as always, Alice Paul visualized her work in pageantry. On this
occasion, that pageantry was particularly beautiful. Zona Gale writes in
the _Suffragist_:
“I shall watch it, but it will not mean anything to me,” said a
visitor to me on Saturday, but that night she said: “I leaned out of
my window, and held my screen up with one hand, and let the sun beat
in my face for the forty minutes that you were passing, and I wept.
To think of your being part of it—and caring like that—and the men
there on the sidewalk holding back, _by what right_, what you ask!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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