More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The already outrageous treatment of peaceful suffragist pickets by the authorities became even more disgraceful today. Alice Paul, serving two sentences totaling seven months for picketing outside the White House fence, has now begun to undergo force-feeding, imposed on her seventy-eight hours after beginning a hunger strike.
Waking up today to headlines proving yesterday’s victory was not a dream, but a dream come true, the festive atmosphere that prevailed at suffrage offices last night resumed early this morning amid a run on “I Am A Voter” buttons at the headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association by the newly enfranchised women of New York State.
New York is now an equal suffrage State, and tonight the campaign’s leaders are already enthusiastically planning how to use their enhanced power to push for winning woman suffrage nationwide through the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, named for the legendary pioneer suffragist, who was arrested, tried and convicted of having “illegally” voted in New York State in 1872.
Tonight, the final suffrage meetings and rallies are going on, and our leaders are making sure that the armies of volunteers who have been working almost non-stop through two successive campaigns are ready to shift gears overnight and work just as hard to assure a fair election, as well as make sure that every man in New York State who wants to vote for woman suffrage gets to the polls tomorrow.
The New York State suffrage campaign is coming to an enthusiastic and optimistic finish with just two more days remaining until the vote.
It’s hard to believe it was just two years ago yesterday that the suffrage movement endured its worst setback, because our biggest victory may be just three days away! But twenty-four months of constant campaigning, unprecedented political organizing–– and U.S. entry into the war––have changed everything.
“Although we may not have won the ballot this time, we have won hundreds of thousands of supporters by this fight. We have lost nothing. It is our opponents who have lost. They had the whole State before, they haven’t now.”
Election Day is tomorrow, so this final full day of the New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts suffrage campaigns has been an incredibly hectic one.
This means that there will be no repeat of what happened in New Jersey a week ago when the most powerful political machine in the State campaigned vigorously against the suffrage amendment, and used every trick in the book on Election Day to insure its defeat.
In just over a week, the largest, second largest and sixth largest states in regard to population could be added to the roll of suffrage States, and if this feat is accomplished, it could certainly add to the already growing impression that the “Votes for Women” movement is an unstoppable force sweeping the nation!