The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

that I’m sure they’ll get what they want. I wouldn’t use a vote if I had one, but that doesn’t keep me from joining them when they’re making such a good fight. I approve of violence, not necessarily as undignified as that of England. But it is violence just the same when a crowd of women get arrested for picketing in front of the White House and sent to jail. And the way they’ve kept at it for the last year! You can’t help but admire their persistence.”

She beamed earnestly at them as she finished her cocktail and ordered a highball.

“For goodness sake,” Ivan cried, “stop mixing drinks. Do you want to get sick and messy? You know I won’t take care of females who haven’t any sense in that way. If you want to get gently exhilarated take another cocktail, the same kind you had before.”

“Lea’ me alone,” Billy mumbled with a straw between her lips. “I’ve dreamt of these drinks for the last thirty days and I must take the train and go back to Washington again tonight. They’re going to have another demonstration tomorrow and I can’t get a check for those drawings until after they’re published.”

Both Ivan and June offered to lend Billy whatever they had with them. “No, thanks,” she said sweetly, “you know I just want to go. Why don’t you go with me,” she turned to June. “You’re at a loose end now that the Flame has been stopped. You might as well employ your time in doing something useful. You’ve served radicals of all kinds so why not be a suffragist for a time?”

June considered the idea seriously. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t go. I hate not to be working and I don’t see what there is I can do just now. There isn’t a job in sight and Daniel has finally managed to get in the service and is going abroad and Kenneth is working for the capitalist press and Hugh is busy with his book.⁠ ⁠… Why not?” And at a remark from Ivan, “If you can’t do anything but protest this evening, you’d better go join that poker game that I lured you away from. Billy and I can then discuss jail in peace.”

But Ivan preferred to hear Billy’s story of her experiences and refused to leave them and the evening ended with his escorting the two of them to the train at the Pennsylvania station.

“All you need is a change of clothing while you’re waiting to get into jail and some books to read when you get there,” Billy said, so there was no packing to do. “And don’t take anything valuable because it will only be stolen or spoiled before you get out. They’re getting more and more exasperated with the prisoners and they’re liable to try some rough stuff.”

After all, it was really for the sake of a cause that June decided to go with Billy on her second expedition.

“What the suffragists are going to do this time, is strike for the rights of political prisoners,” Billy had told her. “You see up to this time the women have just stood at the gates of the White House and when they were arrested and tried for disorderly conduct, they’ve gone to the workhouse⁠—not the jail exactly⁠—and worked out their sentences. They’ve had to give up their own clothes and wear prison dresses, eat the filthy food that is provided by the authorities and sometimes they were allowed to have books and sometimes they weren’t. And sometimes they got their mail and sometimes they didn’t. What they want to fight for is the right to have the privileges that are granted to political prisoners in every country in Europe⁠—to keep their own clothes, not to have to work, the right to buy food and see their own doctors and lawyers and to have books and papers.”

“I think,” Ivan agreed with her warmly, “that that’s a cause that’s worth fighting for. It will be the first time in the history of America that political prisoners have fought for their rights and it’s about time.”

“Especially since all these promiscuous arrests have been made,” June chimed in enthusiastically. “This is a time for fighting and here’s the chance for me. I’ve been feeling rotten to be out of it when all my friends are risking arrest for conscientious objection and for writing and working for radical magazines and publications. I’ll go. Not for suffrage exactly, but for the rights of political prisoners of the United States.”

It was to be a bigger demonstration than any other which had been made up to this time by the suffragists in Washington. When June arrived there for the second time that year, she found that thirty-five women had responded to the organization’s call for picketers and represented many states in the union.

New York, as would be expected, was more represented than the others. There was Mrs. Bolton, the wife of a surgeon in one of New York’s largest hospitals. A young Russian Jewess came from the East Side, leaving her husband behind her to take care of her eight month old baby. And there were Billy and June.

Chicago was represented by a woman aviator and doctor who practiced neither one nor the other of her professions. Her machine was held because she could not afford to pay a repair bill, and she had been concerned in a scandal in Chicago which led her to give up her practice and come to the east. (After the suffrage disturbances were over she worked as a streetcar conductor and still later as a munition maker.)

Mrs. Prindiville, sixty years old, was the dignified representative of an old Philadelphia family.

Eleanor Arnold came from one of the few stubborn families on Beacon Hill in Boston, who refused to move from their traditional home to Back Bay. June deduced from later conversation with her that the real reason she came to Washington and to jail was to worry her father and mother