alice paul is a slender, frail-looking young woman, delicately colored and delicately made. the head, the neck, the long slim arms, and the little hands look as though they were cut out of alabaster. the dense shadowy hair, scooping with deeper accessions of shadow into great waves, dipping low on her forehead and massing into a great dusky bunch in her neck, might be carved from bronze. it looks too heavy for her head. her face has a kind of powerful irregularity. its prevailing expression is of a brooding stillness; yet when she smiles, dimples appear. her eyes are big and quiet; dark—like moss-agates. when she is silent they are almost opaque. when she talks they light up—rather they glow—in a notable degree of luminosity. her voice is low; musical; it pulsates with a kind of interrogative plaintiveness. when you ask her a question, there ensues, on her part, a moment of a stillness so profound, you can almost hear it. i think i have never seen anybody who can keep so still as alice paul. but when she answers you, the lucidity of exposition, the directness of expression! always she looks you straight in the eye, and when she has finished speaking she holds you with that luminous glow. her tiny hands make gestures, almost humorous in their gentleness and futility, compared with the force of her remarks.
in the endless discussions at headquarters—discussions that consider every subject on earth and change constantly in personnel and point of view—she is always the most silent. but when at last she speaks, often there ensues a pause; she has summed it all up. superficially she seems cold, austere, a little remote. but that is only because the 15fire of her spirit burns at such a heat that it is still and white. she has the quiet of the spinning top.
as for her mentality ... her capacity for leadership ... her vision.... there is no difference of opinion in regard to alice paul in the woman’s party. with one accord, they say, “she is the party.” they regard her with an admiration which verges on awe. mentally she walks apart; not because she has any conscious sense of superiority, but because of the swiftness, amplitude, and completeness with which her mind marches—her marvelous powers of concentration and her blazing devotion to the work.
i think no better description can be given of her than to quote the exact phrases which her associates use in talking of her. winifred mallon speaks of her “burning sincerity.” helena hill weed imputes a “prescience” to her. anne martin says, “she is the heart, brain, and soul of the woman’s party,” and “her mind moves with the precision of a beautiful machine.” nina allender sums her up as “a napoleon without self-indulgence.” she said that when at the hearing in 1915, congressmen tried to tangle alice paul they found it an impossibility; everything in alice paul’s mentality was so clear; there was nothing to tangle. she added, “there are no two minds to alice paul.” “my mother describes her,” she concluded, “as a flame undyingly burning.”
this is maud younger’s tribute:
she has in the first place a devotion to the cause which is absolutely self-sacrificing. she has an indomitable will. she recognizes no obstacles. she has a clear, penetrating, analytic mind which cleaves straight to the heart of things. in examining a situation, she always bares the main fact; she sees all the forces which make for change in that situation. she is a genius for organization, both in the mass and in detail. she understands perfectly, in achieving the big object, the cumulative effect of multitudes of small actions and small services. she makes use of all material, whether human or otherwise, that comes along. her work has perpetual growth; it never stagnates; 16it is always branching out. she is never hampered or cluttered. she is free of the past. her inventiveness and resourcefulness are endless. she believes absolutely in open diplomacy. she believes that everything should be told; our main argument with her was in regard to the necessity for secrecy in special cases. she is almost without suspicion; and sometimes with a too-great tendency towards kind judgment in the case of the individual. it seems incredible that with all these purely intellectual gifts, she should possess an acute appreciation of beauty; a gift for pageantry; an amazing sense of humor.
lucy burns says:
when alice paul spoke to me about the federal work, i knew that she had an extraordinary mind, extraordinary courage and remarkable executive ability. but i felt she had two disabilities—ill-health and a lack of knowledge of human nature. i was wrong in both. i was staggered by her speed and industry and the way she could raise money. her great assets, i should say, are her power, with a single leap of the imagination, to make plans on a national scale; and a supplementary power to see that done down to the last postage stamp. but because she can do all this, people let her do it—often she has to carry her own plans out down to the very last postage stamp. she used all kinds of people; she tested them through results. she is exceedingly charitable in her judgments of people and patient. she assigned one inept person to five different kinds of work before she gave her up. her abruptness lost some workers, but not the finer spirits. the very absence of anything like personal appeal seemed to help her.
lucy burns at the head of the “prison specialists.”
these women, all of whom served terms in jail, are wearing
a reproduction of their prison garb.
photo copr. harris and ewing, washington, d. c.
lucy burns is as different a type from alice paul as one could imagine. she is tall—or at least she seems tall; rounded and muscular; a splendidly vigorous physical specimen. if alice paul looks as though she were a tanagra carved from alabaster, lucy burns seems like a figure, heroically sculptured, from marble. she is blue-eyed and fresh-complexioned; dimpled; and her head is burdened, even as alice paul’s, by an enormous weight of hair. lucy burn’s hair is a brilliant red; and even as she flashes, it flashes. it is full of sparkle. she is a woman of twofold ability. she speaks and writes with equal eloquence and 17elegance. her speeches before suffrage bodies, her editorials in the suffragist are models of clearness; conciseness; of accumulative force of expression. mentally and emotionally, she is quick and warm. her convictions are all vigorous and i do not think lucy burns would hesitate for a moment to suffer torture, to die, for them. she has intellectuality of a high order; but she overruns with a winning irishness which supplements that intellectuality with grace and charm; a social mobility of extreme sensitiveness and swiftness. in those early days in washington, with all her uncompromising militantism, lucy burns was the diplomat of the pair; the tactful, placating force.
i asked a member of the woman’s party who had watched the work from the beginning what was the difference between the two women. she answered, “they are both political-minded. they seemed in those early days to have one spirit and one brain. both saw the situation exactly as it was, but they went at the problem with different methods. alice paul had a more acute sense of justice, lucy burns, a more bitter sense of injustice. lucy burns would become angry because the president or the people did not do this or that. alice paul never expected anything of them.”
both these women had the highest kind of courage. lucy burns—although she admits that at occoquan workhouse, she suffered from nameless terrors—has a mental poise that is almost unsusceptible to fear. alice paul—although she can with perfect composure endure arrest, imprisonment, hunger-striking—acknowledges timidities. she does not like to listen to horrors of any description, especially ghost-stories. they say though that, in the movies, she always particularly enjoyed pirates.
