Fighting for Life

by S. Josephine Baker

  You drove out in a wagon or car, pulled up at the curb on Columbus Circle or Union Square, and stood up and harangued anybody you could get to listen to you. Or else the committee rented a vacant store for an impromptu hall. I did a lot of my orating in such a vacant store on Nassau Street, where we could count on audiences of Wall Street clerks, office-boys and messengers, all killing time during their lunch-hours and looking for amusement. I seldom lacked an audience—an audience exclusively male, average age about twenty-eight, full of scorn for the weaker sex and by no means shy of showing it.

  In other words they were natural hecklers and you had to know how to handle them. “Why aren’t you home where you belong?” “Who’s going to mind the baby when you’re out voting?” “Women don’t want to vote—it’s just the old maids!”—those are fair samples. To listen to them you would have thought every woman in the country who ever stepped out the door of her house was wantonly neglecting three pairs of ailing twins. And I never could make out just how that fitted their conviction that all suffragettes were meddlesome old maids. A ready tongue in your head, giving them as good as they sent with all possible good humor, was the only solution. I was a little shy and mumbly about it at first, but these Wall Street skeptics gave me plenty of experience in a short time and presently I enjoyed myself standing there on a rickety staging and throwing out the answers as fast as the questions came. I never reached the heights of Christabel Pankhurst’s classic comeback when she was making a suffrage speech in London. A man shouted at her: “If you were my wife, I’d give you poison!” “If I were your wife,” shouted Christabel at the man, “I’d take it!” But I managed the purpose in hand.

  For instance, one noontime a fairly bright-looking man asked me this one, a sample of the occasional intelligent questions: “You say that women will abolish child-labor if they get the vote. All right, women have always had the vote in Wyoming and yet Wyoming has no child-labor law. How do you make that out?” I was pretty well primed with facts and figures, but this one had escaped me. I could afford only a couple of seconds to reflect in, but that was enough: “There are no factories in Wyoming,” I said, “so there is no child labor. Wyoming has no child-labor law for the same reason that Massachusetts has no prairie-dog law.” A comeback no wittier than that would often bring down the house and get them all on my side. That was the main job—showing them that suffragettes were not window-smashing, bloomers-wearing freaks, but normal, give-and-take people able to take care of themselves and look the world squarely in the eye. We had to have that sort of recognition in order ever to make any headway against the masculine conviction that suffragism was just crank-stuff.

  The climax of the campaign for this all-important prestige came in the White House. I had the luck to be there. Up to that point nobody really knew—although there was any amount of wild guessing going on in both camps— just what President Wilson thought about equal suffrage. One evening I received a telephone call from Mrs. Norman Whitehouse, the brilliant field-general of the New York State suffrage army, telling me that she had managed to get the President’s consent to receive a small group of prominent suffrage-workers and tell them what his attitude was. She wanted to know if I would be one of the party. I should like to have seen anything that could have stopped me! The committee severally made a dash for Washington trains, rendezvoused at a hotel in Washington the next morning and went in a tense, silent group to the White House.

  No one had to say this was a crisis. With the President’s prestige on our side, nothing could stop us. With the President against us, or merely passive—that did not bear thinking about. I had not had that exact feeling since the time I marched into the room to deliver my first obstetrical case.

  Although this was early in the war, Mr. Wilson was already a tired man; you could see that in his eyes. But he was totally unlike the cold, silent stand-offish person we had been led to expect. There was cordial warmth in his handshake and in his courteous insistence on making us aware that he knew who each of us was and on asking about our personal activities. Then he said:

  “I would like to make a speech to the whole group with a stenographer to take it down. I wish I could go and address a large meeting in New York but affairs here will not let me. This will have to be my contribution.”

  That sounded promising; how promising we did not know until he began to speak. He could not have made a more satisfactory speech if he had asked us beforehand to write down just what we wanted him to say and worked up his speech from those notes. When he had finished, he said:

  “Will that do? Will that be of use to you?”

  We said that it was several degrees better than perfect and he smiled, then made a farewell round of the group and went out. It was stunning in both the correct and the slang senses of the word.

  Largely by accident, I suppose, he had delayed taking a definite stand about suffrage until the exact moment when the psychological effect of his support would do the most good. As we went back to New York we all felt that our fight had finally been won there in that White House reception room. We were right. At the next election New York State gave the vote to its millions of women and in a relatively short time after that the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified into the Constitution by the thirty-sixth state.

  That was at once a great victory and a great deprivation. When the enemy was routed, the woman’s suffrage army disbanded and we lost all that sense of solidarity and comradeship which I valued all the more, I suppose, because I came into it later than those of my contemporaries who were among its pioneers. There is no suffrage Grand Army of the Republic to keep the old campaigners together; we are scattered, and the vote is won, and the present generation, rightly enough perhaps, doesn’t care why, when or how.

  I do not think anyone who was a member of that army, however, can fail to be bitterly disappointed in the negligible consequences of giving women the vote. I should dislike to try to maintain the thesis that, since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, political corruption has been on the downgrade in American states and municipalities, or in the Federal government either. And the very fact that the child-labor amendment is still so far from ratification should be enough to show how American women have failed to keep the promises of banding together to improve social and political conditions which were sown broadcast as women’s suffrage propaganda. I have shouted those promises myself at street-corner audiences. There is no such thing as a women’s vote that has to be taken into account with the same care as the American Legion vote and the C.I.O. vote and the farmers’ vote; and yet, if women had really tried to do what they promised to do, their objectives would probably bear closer scrutiny than those of any bloc of franchises now cluttering up the American political scene.

  It is particularly distressing to an old warhorse who spent a good deal of time in the thick of the suffrage-battle to see that when women do hold office, it is usually as an expedient sop to the female voter rather than because the lady-holder has done the party any large service or because she is extraordinarily good at this job. The number of female office-holders in proportion to the number of men is probably an accurate index of the politician’s neglect of the sex that was going to change the world with ballots. Outside politics, boom times put many and many a woman into a man’s job, but the depression swept most of them out again. The only place they have held their own is down the scale, where low salaries and no particular need for intelligence keep the economic pressure at lower levels.

  Not long ago I went to Washington to attend a dinner of state-directors of Federal child-welfare work. Fifteen years ago, when those jobs were first established by the administration of the Sheppard-Towner Act, only three out of forty-eight of these state-directors were men. Today three-quarters of them are men. I am not impugning the capacity of any of those men as individuals when I say that that looks very strange in a line of activity which was invented and developed by women.

  CHAPTER XI

  BABIES, WARTIME DOINGS AND
MILITANT SUFFRAGE work—you can see why I look back on those times as miraculously full of excitement and dashings to and fro, no matter how little some of it may have proved effective. Fortunately for my nervous system, just before the war broke out, largely against my will, I was forced to abandon my private practice. For, all the time I had been organizing the Bureau of Child Hygiene and inventing new ways to take care of children and fighting for the Bureau’s political life, I had also been carrying on a growing medical career —largely with children as patients. Neither the organization and development of a new field of public-health activity nor the practice of pediatrics is exactly a part-time job. It occurs to me now that that may have been why I never had time for vacations, as other people seem to have.

  Or to be exact I had three, two-week vacations during the first seven years I spent in the Health Department. Since the summer was the height of our baby-saving campaign, I could never take even those meager holidays when they were conventionally supposed to come. Instead I worked at the Bureau night after night. I was actually enthusiastic enough to be glad that my private practice tapered off to practically nothing during the summer, so I could devote myself entirely to the Bureau. I seldom reached home at night without a briefcase full of papers for which there had been no time during the day. In order to free my mind of all possible detail, I evolved a system of sending postcards to myself which I recommend to anybody else with too many things on his mind. When I wanted to remember to bring something from home to office or do something the first thing in the morning, I wrote and mailed myself a penny postcard from the office, which would then appear with my mail and coffee the next morning. If I thought of something at home which needed doing at the office the next day, a similar postcard was dropped in the box and turned up on my desk. If affairs were very pressing there would be a dozen or fifteen of them neatly stacked in each place.

  Spending a summer of hard work in New York is not necessarily intolerable. I have done it often enough to know. Dr. Laighton and I had made enough money to take a house for ourselves, a four-story affair which had been built for Rose Coghlan, the great actress, on a side street off Central Park, much too ornate for our tastes but commodious and strikingly cool in the summertime. Whenever there was any spare time, the Park was there, and there were dozens of cool roof-gardens to while away time in. At that time New York was a great center for summer tourists, out-of-towners equipped with guidebooks and umbrellas, earnestly trooping round to see the sights and bombarding bus drivers with questions about everything from Grant’s Tomb to the Aquarium. They were harmless and cheery people, and a bus ride among a group of them was as amusing a way to spend the cool evening as anything you can imagine.

  No doubt I was still quite young enough to be flexible about things. I could never feel any alarm at all, for instance, about the first car Dr. Laighton and I bought in 1900, with the excuse that it would be useful for calling on patients; actually, of course, because we were childishly amused with the idea of a new toy. It was a Prescott steamer, and as cantankerous and cross-grained a contraption as ever rode on wheels. Its water supply would last only twenty miles, so it was necessary to carry a collapsible rubber bucket to replenish the supply every hour or so. It took a good half hour to get steam up in it, once the boiler was allowed to cool down, which meant unconscionable delay every time we used it to make calls on patients. Motor cars were still so rare that, every time we left it at the curb, we would return to find it completely invisible under a mass of crawling, prying contemptuous small boys who, when sent packing, would stand around and hoot, “Get a horse! Get a horse!” after us as we slowly steamed away. Public attention was not merely embarrassing. The heating apparatus was a gasoline-spray, which would shoot flames in all directions as we started up, and every now and again some excited spectator would turn in a fire-alarm. No doubt there was a certain truth in the spectator’s hasty conclusion that anything which looked that dangerous probably was dangerous. The interior of the boxlike thing we sat on, which contained the engine, was a seething mass of flame all the time. But I could never worry at all about this intimate contact with potential explosions. Subsequent cars were probably most unsafe too: that one-cylindered Cadillac we had, and an Oldsmobile that steered with a front lever, not to mention two or three electrics. But the only cars that I have ever managed to worry about have been the modern highly efficient and practically fool-proof variety. I suppose that sort of thing just has to happen to your mental habits as you get older.

  Somehow real danger is always hard to believe in. While I was still in private practice, a woman came to me during office hours one day and told me she was pregnant, which she demonstrably was, and asked me to sign a paper giving it as my professional opinion that the father of the baby was a certain man from whom she was planning to get money. When I explained that no doctor on earth could conscientiously make such a statement about any baby, born or unborn, she flew into an insane rage and began shrieking that she was going to kill me if I did not sign the paper. That went on for some time, after which I ejected her from the premises with as much dignity as could be managed and went about my business, mildly amused, distressed but by no means inclined to be alarmed. The next day in the paper, I saw a story about this woman. She had made the same proposition to a doctor on Madison Avenue and, when he refused as I had, took out a gun and killed him.

  There was hardly more sense of reality about the occasion when a woman shot and killed a man in my Department of Health office. Dr. Royall H. Willis, the Assistant Director of the Bureau, and I were discussing some departmental problem when we heard two shots crash out in the outer office. We ran outside and I saw, without feeling anywhere near as much shock as I should have, a woman standing there with a revolver in her hand, smoke still oozing out of its muzzle, and a man lying face down on the floor, obviously dead. I went up to the woman and held out my hand for the revolver. She gave it to me without any fuss and then we called the police. When investigated, it proved to be the usual story of seduction under promise of marriage. They had had a baby and he had brought mother and child to our office to arrange to have the child boarded out with a foster-mother. The mother, unable to stand the idea of seeing her child taken away, had brought along a revolver and, when the baby was handed over, shot her man in the back, cleanly drilling his heart the first shot. Her second shot buried itself in the wall just six inches over the head of Miss Wilhelmina Rothermund, the Bureau’s invaluable Superintendent of Nurses. It was first-degree murder, certainly as deliberate as any crime ever committed. But, after we had talked to the Assistant District Attorney in charge of the case, he agreed to accept a plea of guilty of manslaughter. The man was a thoroughly bad lot who had several other achievements of this sort in his past. The woman had only to serve three years in a reformatory and, best of all, was allowed to have her baby with her while she was there.

  There was far more sense of peril in the crisis that arose in my affairs when the question of my Civil Service standing broke over my head in the early part of 1914. With the inauguration of John Purroy Mitchel, who had been elected in the teeth of bitter Tammany opposition, his whole new administration set vigorously to work cleaning up and regularizing all city departments. Our bureau did not need cleaning up. But when Dr. S. S. Goldwater, the new Commissioner of Health, took office, it turned out that regularizing was another matter.

  Dr. Goldwater was the finest Commissioner I ever served under, and I served under several very good men indeed. At the time, however, my admiration for him was considerably tempered by the fact that, as soon as he became Commissioner of Health, he insisted that I give up my private practice and concentrate wholly on the work of the Bureau. That was a difficult decision to face. I found that, when I was told I would have to give up my private patients or resign, I liked private practice and would miss it. Besides, it had developed to a point where it was bringing in an excellent income. To confine myself to the Bureau, even at a promised increase in salary, would be a d
efinite financial sacrifice. Once upon a time I had been able to get along on very little income very cheerfully. But it is one thing to start out on a minimum basis and feel merely amused by privations; it is quite another to have worked up mildly luxurious habits and tastes and then have to cut them down. Still, if it was a question of resigning from my beloved Bureau, I had no choice whatever. I could no more have given up that job of my own free will than I could have grown wings and flown. So I sent cards to all of my patients, announcing my retirement from practice, and from then on public health work was the sole reason for my existence.

  That had been decided when regularization began in earnest. I found, or rather others found for me, that although I had been regularly promoted by the Board of Health in the past, I had never taken the Civil Service examinations to correspond to my promotions. The first examination, away back in the early days, was my only claim to civil service standing, and that was not enough. The prospect of an examination had never occurred to me, I was much too busy with other things. And it had never occurred to anyone else. So it was made very plain that all of us who had progressed from lowly beginnings would have to take examinations to entitle us to our present jobs. What was worse for me, the examination was open to doctors in lower grades and, if someone earned a better rating than I could, I would be demoted from my position as head of the Bureau. I had everything to lose on the hazard of the examination, and an examination is always a hazard. Everyone else had something potentially to gain. But there was no help for it, and it was a very hot summer, with the battle to keep the baby death rate down always to be waged. The examination, when it came, was the most difficult one I had ever encountered. Both oral and written, the written part lasting a whole day and the oral conducted by a board of New York’s best pediatricians.