"Remember the ladies," Abigail Adams wrote to her husband when he went off to help write the Declaration of Independence. "If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion." John Adams and the other signers did pretty much forget the ladies—but the ladies did not forget. Last week the sound of rebellion trilled across Capitol Hill. With banners flying, the not-to-be-forgotten sisters of Abigail Adams were on the march.
The nub of their demands was that women's suffrage was not enough. They demanded a constitutional amendment which declared: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex." The battle was joined when Iowa's earnest, white-haired Guy Gillette introduced the amendment on the floor of the Senate.
With Every Weapon. The ladies-moving spirit was an invincible feminist, wan, whisperingly insistent, 65-year-old Alice Paul. During World War I, she had been thrown into jail for picketing the White House; she was forcibly fed when she declined to eat. She helped found the National Woman's Party. She was the spiritual sister of Abigail Adams, of Amelia Jenks Bloomer, the first bloomer girl, of those heroines of women's rights—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott—before whose statue in the crypt of the Capitol she had posed, tight-lipped and purposeful.
Behind her and the proposed 22nd Amendment were Bess Truman, Perle Mesta, women's organizations by the score—her own National Woman's Party, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the 'American Medical Women's Association, the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, the National Association of Colored Women. Miss Paul and her cohorts rapped on Senate doors, buttonholed Senators. Their weapons were whatever came to hand—documents, dialectics, plain talk and implied political threats. Some, like Ernestine Bellamy, distant relative of Edward (Looking Backward) Bellamy, splendidly flashed the most invincible feminine weapon of all (see cut).
Aren't Women Persons? They argued that the whole body of English common law tended to relegate women to the class of chattel. As the redoubtable Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, sister of ex-Senator Joe Guffey, had pointed out during earlier Senate committee hearings: "We women want to be persons now because we are still not persons in the Constitution."
They argued that in some states women were not allowed to serve on juries, or to run a business and keep the profits without their husbands' consent. In some states a husband might get a divorce from an unfaithful wife but not vice versa. In some states women might not handle baggage, mix strong drinks in public places, work in blast furnaces, bowling alleys or shoeshine parlors. It was not a question of whether they wanted to do these things; they just resented the implication of inferiority. The proposed amendment would wipe out all such strictures at one stroke.