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 asked Mabel Vernon, who went to Swarthmore with her, about Alice Paul.
Her impressions were a little vague—mainly of a normal, average young
girl who had not yet begun to “show.” She remembered that, although
biology was her specialty, Miss Paul was catholic in her choice of
courses; how—as though it were something she expected to need—she took a
great deal of Latin; and that—as though at the urge of the same
intuition—she devoted herself to athletics. She had apparently no
athletic gifts; yet before she left Swarthmore she was on the girls’
varsity basketball team, was on her own class hockey team, and had taken
third place in the women’s tennis tournament. She was a rosy, rounded,
vigorous-looking girl then. When Mabel Vernon saw her next, she had been
hunger-striking in England and was thin to the point of emaciation.
I asked Alice Paul herself about her work with the poor in England. She
said, looking back on it—and it is apparently always a great effort for
her to remove her mental vision from the present demand—that her main
impression was of the hopelessness of it all, that there seemed nothing
to do but sweep all that poverty away. The thing that she remembers
especially now is that they were always burying children.
The first great, outstanding fact of Alice Paul’s training is that in
the English interregnum which divided her American education, she joined
the Pankhurst forces. In the beginning all her work was of the passive
kind. She attended meetings and ushered. She was about to go home;
indeed she had bought her passage when the Pankhursts asked her to join
a deputation to Parliament. This deputation, which consisted of more
than a hundred women, and was led by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, was
arrested at the entrance to Parliament. They were detained in the
policemen’s billiard room of the Cannon Row Police Station, the only
place at that station large enough to hold so many women.
The second great outstanding fact of Alice Paul’s career in England is
that she met Lucy Burns.
Lucy Burns was born in Brooklyn. The facts of her education, although
superficially not so multitudinous as those of Alice Paul, are even more
impressive in point of international quality. She was graduated from
Packer Institute in 1899 and from Vassar College in 1902. She studied at
Yale University in 1902-03, at the University of Berlin in 1906-08, at
the University of Bonn in 1908-09. She joined the Woman’s Social and
Political Union of London in 1909 and she worked as an organizer in
Edinburgh and the east of Scotland in 1909-12.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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