I

SAT in the gallery of the House of Representatives last winter, and looked down on the harmless head of Representative Alice Robertson of Oklahoma-"Aunt Alice," with a sharp tongue for more than one woman's organization in Washington and a kind way with "the boys" in Congress. Gone was Jeannette Rankin, with her bills investigating the long hours in the government printing establishment, and her white satin skirts, symbol that woman was woman still even in politics. Jeannette Rankin had vanished, and I suppose I am the only person in the world who cares to have it on record that she did not cry that day she voted against war. There was a catch in her voice as she voted "No" after hours of weary wrestling with her brother, who begged her to vote "Yes," but no tears. The newspapers invented those as adornment to their story of the first congresswoman who really did believe in "outlawing war."

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Last winter Alice Robertson was already a lame duck, swept out, as she had been swept in, by a party tide; Winifred Huck had come to the seat where her father, Billy Mason, used to sit; and telegrams from California announced that the widow of Nolan had been chosen to fill his empty place. Mrs. Felton had been shipped North for a few days' outing and a name in

history as the first woman senator, all that Governor Hardwick might make political capital out of gallantry.

I felt very much becalmed there in the gallery in the same seat I used to sit in beside Doris Stevens when she railed against the congressmen who rose to put handsome remarks into the record about shipwrecks and "women and children first." "Pish tush!" she would say, "a woman blobs up and down in the water hardly once in a lifetime." How impatient we were when Brandegee and Heflin and John Sharp Williams and many others contended that roofs would no longer shelter homes or children be begotten or any good come to those already born if woman walked alone by herself to the polls. Queer how old evil prophecies sound ridiculous the morning after.

There was a time just after the suffrage amendment was passed when there was a new fear of God in a good many politicians a fear of something new, of women, that amounted to a fear of God. Much of it was the afterwar fear of the people rather than of women. It lasted for several months. There was uneasiness in local camps. That uneasiness has died. There is only one important political issue where suffrage has made any difference: the politicians realize that prohibition is fastened on for keeps,

though at that, the latest comer to Congress, Mrs. Nolan, is hailed by the Baltimore "Sun" as a "wet."

I talked to newspaper men and editors, to politicians, and to women, dozens and dozens of them in New York and Washington. Now that women had suffrage, I asked, had they anything tangible in the way of power, were they as effective as a group or bloc for getting past some mile-post to some objective, as they had been in the days when they got their suffrage amendment through? The answers were many and varied, but the tune was pretty much the same. One magazine writer, a woman thick in political life since she was a young girl, who addresses more meetings in more parts of the country than any one I know, meetings of bankers, bakers, women's clubs, Rotary clubs,-and who writes regularly for one of the women's magazines, summed up all the answers.

"Oh dear, no," she said. "Women have n't any political power that amounts to anything. Men don't share anything with them. The politicians just hand them all-day suckers. They give them busy work."

I was the more amused because that woman makes her living throwing bouquets at her own sex. Day by day she preaches to them that women are becoming more important, but she is a half-hearted Coué. In private she admits that the let-down in the letter of political participation has n't made much difference in the spirit. The best that can be said is that certain women have advanced themselves.

W. E. B. DuBois, whom I questioned on the lack of negro women leaders, replied in his usual philosophic vein. He gave me an analogy. In reconstruction days it was assumed

that negroes would not tolerate Southern conditions and would migrate North. "Social changes come slowly, like molasses from jugs. The negroes did begin to migrate, but only after forty years." In forty years we shall know something about women in politics.

Alice Paul touched the heart of the matter. The real fight for equality, she says, can never be won in legislatures. Women have an economic fight to win before they are an effective force in politics. Political forms crystallize long after economic power has established its pattern. Most women are still dependent on men economically, and of the growing number who earn their own livings, most earn inadequate livings. Propertied women, even, are apt not to have any real power despite their money. Their affairs are administered by men, and they themselves, as Mrs. Medill McCormick once complained, when making political plans, spend their money in pennies rather than in thousands of dollars. Women are only slowly learning that money is power, that the roots of power are in economic status.

One is so often made to feel apologetic for pessimism, real or apparent, by Americans and especially by American women that one hastens to be explicit as to the rosiness of the future. Time is on the side of the freedom of women. The development of industrial organization tends to make women self-supporting and freer from men, just as it tends to make it impossible for men to support unemployed women and their families. But an observer with a feminist slant may certainly be excused for suggesting that the day for crowing has not yet come, when a thousand male postal

employees in Washington hold a protest meeting, as they did last winter, when a woman employee is promoted above them at a higher wage. Despite the feature stories in the newspapers about the first woman diplomat and the first woman scissorsgrinder, the innumerable "firsts," the undertow in the economic world is against

women.

From these fears one may turn to the spectacle of the individual women

who are well forward in the Washington scene. They are many vivid, energetic, efficient "personalities." Women secretaries not stenographers, but secretariesare becoming fashionable in the senate and house

divorce; Lucy Branham, who ceaselessly calls attention to Russian recognition; Abby Scott Baker, who argues wittily and incessantly for amnesty for political prisoners.

Senator Moses both have them. No busts in the Capitol corridors are so conspicuous as those of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, three heads emerging from a single block of marble, like three heads from a cabinet bath. Among the most active lobbyists who pluck at the legislative attention are Genevieve Parkhurst, who makes the round on behalf of a Federal amendment on the subject of marriage and

of affairs. Miss Addams's national leadership was a slow growth through years of wise humanitarian understanding of municipal and international affairs. She is a great conciliator.

Mr. Gifford Pinchot is credited with having drawn Miss Addams and her fellow-settlement worker, Miss Lillian Wald of the House on Henry Street, on to the Washington scene. In Mr. Pinchot's early fight for the conserva

tion of our national forests he found unexpected backing backing among club women and social workers who had a fundamental bias in favor of farming our national resources, natural and human, rather than ruthlessly mining them. It was he who counseled Roosevelt to draw in the social workers who fur

nished the luster

in the Progressive party.

Those now active on the stage at Washington are: Emily Newell Blair of the Democratic National Committee; Mrs. Harriet Taylor

years has led the fight for maternalistic legislation on the limitation of hours and the minimum wage; Mabel Willebrandt, assistant attorney-general in charge of the division handling

Upton of the National Republican Committee; Mrs. Maud Wood Park, president of the National League of Women Voters, director of a busy hive of workers in an imposing house across the street from the State, War, and Navy Building; Alice Paul, vice-chairman of the National Woman's Party, in the rambling old mansion upon Capitol Hill that Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont has bought for a feminist fort, with guns turned on Congress; Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Mrs. Borden Harriman, around whose tables all the mysteries of national politics are boiled down to talk and gossip; Cornelia Bryce Pinchot and Ruth Hanna McCormick, both capable of independent political careers and each her husband's real political manager; Florence Kelley, "Pig-iron" Kelley's daughter, who as general secretary of the National Consumers' League for many

cases under the prohibition and tax laws; and Grace Abbott, director of the Children's Bureau in the Department of Labor. Each of the national committees of the two great parties has one woman member on salary working at headquarters. Mrs. Emily Newell Blair, vice-chairman of

the Democratic National Committee, I met for the first time this spring when she was holding a "Democratic school" at the Hotel Commodore in New York-a school managed on the old suffrage school plans, and in its machinery not very different from the communist propaganda schools I saw at work a year ago in Moscow. Here women from the Democratic state party organizations all over the country were brought together and trained to make speeches, to deal with newspapers, to study the party traditions, and taught how to get out the vote. Men are supposed to know these things instinctively, but women take reasonable academic courses in how to lead the donkey to victory. On the surface at least Mrs. Blair is quite the opposite of the woman who preceded her on the Democratic National Committee, Mrs.

George Bass.

Mrs. Bass, a former president of the General Federation of Women's Club, was not at all a disarming figure or a placating personality. Mrs. Blair is diminutive; she has a turned-up nose and a widow's peak and bright brown eyes, and a way with her that makes you understand why many of her co-workers call her "Jenny Wren." They call her something else, too; they call her "Southern Comfort," which is a drink they used to drink before 1918 in her home town, Joplin, Missouri. It slid down the throat like velvet, and about two seconds after there was a kick. Missouri politicians, the Republican ones, and Jim Reed and the rest of the Democratic state machine, have quite another view of her; they don't like her. They remember how she fought Reed at the 1920 convention and got his seat away from him. She came into the Democratic party by way of the suffrage movement. She was living a domestic life with her husband and two children when she began to write for the magazines. Mrs. Medill McCormick "discovered" her and set her to doing publicity for suffrage in Missouri. She contributed to the publicity pageants of the suffrage movement the famous golden lane at the 1916 Democratic convention, a mile of silent women holding yellow parasols (Southern men like women's demonstrations to be silent ones) and suffrage banners. After the vote was won, Mrs. McCormick tried to get Mrs. Blair to throw in her lot with the Republican party, but Mrs. Blair said she never could work with the party of Mark Hanna. Mrs. Blair firmly believes that the two big parties are much more different than tweedledum and tweedledee, and is a very sincere

Democrat with a big D. She conceives of her job on the Democratic committee, I believe, not so much as a Democratic job, in which she puts over the Democratic party on women as a woman's job, where she bores from within the party, amicably educating Democratic men on what women want. She has stiffened her hand by insisting that the vice-chairmanship of the committee, which she holds, be an office elective by the whole committee, and has thus avoided the trials of being an appointee by some powerful boss in the party. She is fast coming to have nationally the name she has in Missouri-that of being not only an engaging woman, but a good hand at understanding the tedious mechanical details of organizing voters, not just to cheer or feel, but to put on their hats, though it be a rainy day, and put an X beside the "proper" candidate.

Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, national chairman of women's Republican organizations and for thirty years a war horse of the suffrage movement, is one of the jolliest women alive. For fifteen years she was treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and because she was the treasurer, she had the job of taking up collections; and because you can't get money from a grouchy crowd, she learned to tell stories. "Tell the story of the little pink fairy," audiences shout at the sight of her. "Tell the story of the umbrella and of hair wash and tooth wash." These stories are as famous as "Casey at the Bat,” and in a way Mrs. Upton is the De Wolfe Hopper of politics.

It is impossible not to be good-natured with her, she herself has such a simple, good-natured view of every