Victory Garden

Prologue I was there that day at the White House in 1917, just before the war. We had gone to Washington to ask for the assistance we were promised when Mr. Woodrow Wilson was campaigning to become the next President of the United States. Then, Wilson considered women’s influences important, worthy of courting and pandering to. He knew he could alienate potential future women voters by not showing interest in our suffrage cause. Wilson said if he were elected President, if the women did their part to influence their fathers, husbands, and sons into voting for him, he would make votes for women a reality. After Wilson was inaugurated in 1912, we were nuisances, no longer worthy of acknowledgment. But we wanted what we had been promised, which was presidential aid in making woman suffrage a reality. We wanted our voices heard. We wanted our freedom and our choices. We weren’t whole citizens. We couldn’t vote. How could we find equality in a society that wouldn’t grant us our rights? Wilson said he didn’t remember his election promises, which is the way of most politicians. But we would no longer allow ourselves to be unremembered. We had been unremembered 70 years by then. Past the green, flowering lawns and the black, wrought-iron gates, inside the pristine, colonial walls of the White House, we were shown into a reception room by a blank-faced attendant who hardly noticed the dozen women before him. We seated ourselves in the chairs set out in neat, school-like rows, with one chair up front for Teacher, as though the People’s House were transformed into a school for impudent girls. We removed our low-lying hats, tugged off our gloves, and then we were told to wait by an over-tired, over-burdened aide who bustled in and scurried out with more important things on his mind. We smoothed our ankle-length skirts and set our faces. “The President is very busy,” the bustling man said when he returned and saw us still waiting. “America will be at war soon. There will be blood and battles, soldiers and death. This will be a show of fortitude, of manpower, and we can no longer isolate ourselves in the world. The President doesn’t have time for women’s issues today.” “But we don’t need guns or bombs or blood-won trenches to make our point, sir,” Lucy Burns said. “We have determined women willing to wait so their daughters and granddaughters will no longer have to.” “You’ll have to wait awhile,” the fidgety man said. “At least until the war is over. This is a time of supreme importance for America. This is our time to propel ourselves into greathood. This is our time to achieve our most worthy ideals of democracy and freedom for the world’s encumbered. There are people who are oppressed in the world.” “We are oppressed in the world,” Lucy Burns said. “There are whole countries with whole languages with whole peoples suffering from the oppression of misguided imperialism. We’re going to join this European war, and we’re going to free the people of the world, and we’re going to put ourselves on the highest rung of the earth’s ladder. We’ll triumph over evil. So, you see, President Wilson is busy. He cannot see you today.” Lucy Burns stood and addressed the man directly. “He has promised to see us for days, months even. Do men not elect presidents who keep their promises?” “He is busy with pressing matters.” “We are pressing matters.” “He is dealing with matters of whole-world importance.” “Then we will wait.” Her rusted red hair nearly matched the intensity of her eyes and the glow of her skin. Lucy Burns wasn’t bitter in her tone. She wasn’t angry or forlorn. She sat as the aide left the room. “We will wait,” she said again. We will wait because it is our fate to wait. He has promised to hear us and we will wait until he does. We have stories to tell and songs to sing. We have been waiting long for acknowledgement and understanding. We will wait our whole lives, just as our mothers waited their whole lives, as our grandmothers waited their whole lives, and their mothers and grandmothers before them, waiting whole human lifetimes as far back as existence can recall. All along we have been waiting our turn. We will still wait, only now we will be visible. You will see us waiting. When the aide passed through some time later and found us still there, he shook his head and backed away, disappearing into antiques and tapestries. I sat close to the window, and as I put my white gloves on I saw the black automobile with the straight-sitting chauffeur and the President, dressed in gray, proper, narrow, unblinking under his owl-eyed rims. His gaze focused nowhere, his expression revealed nothing as the car sputtered passed the White House gates. Next to me was my aunt, Cynthia Wilcox, with whom I shared my suffragist tendencies, and together we watched the car disappear down the drive. She brushed some auburn hair from my eyes, took my white-gloved hands in hers, and sighed. “We won’t see the President today, Rose,” she said. “Another day, Miss Scofield,” Lucy Burns said as she walked past me. “We will see the President another day.” We gathered our parasols and our handbags, adjusted our hats, and left escorted by guards from the White House grounds.