Votes on Pine Street

I am white marble, and I take the weather so nobody else has to. In those winters I learned a new weight at my edge — women arriving in twos and threes, coats carrying coal smoke and printer's ink, purses opening before the bell was answered. Slow feet mean sorrow. These were not slow.

Tickets at a Dollar Fifty

Winter on this block ran on printed announcements. A decade earlier the papers had told the city which afternoons this door would open, and the hall table existed to take calling cards. By January 1915 the announcements had changed their purpose.

Advertising an Equal Franchise Society luncheon, the evening papers printed where a ticket could be had — from a Haverford address, from the society's headquarters downtown, and from Miss Martha Davis, 1822 Pine street. Martha Davis was the society's treasurer. Which means that in the first cold weeks of that year, money for the suffrage cause came to this address: up the step, into the hall, a dollar and a half at a time, counted by a daughter of the house on a table built for calling cards.

They are $1.50 apiece and may be bought from … Miss Martha Davis, 1822 Pine street.

Several hundred tickets went. The women who worked the booth were the same women who had been receiving each other's cards for twenty years — same afternoons, same gloves, turned to a different account. The machinery of the receiving day had been picked up whole and pointed at the legislature.

The Woman Next Door

Two doors shared one length of pavement. Next door at 1820 Pine, Dora Kelly Lewis ran the national suffrage campaign's Philadelphia headquarters out of a Rittenhouse rowhouse indistinguishable from this one: same brick, same four-story front, same white step. From that door came the campaign that put women at the White House gates with banners. Mrs. Lewis picketed. Mrs. Lewis went to prison. Mrs. Lewis went on hunger strike. Whatever was said at this end of the block in those years was said within a hundred feet of both her hall and this one.

There is a difference between a room being used and a room being lived in, and the difference arrives at me first. In those mornings the back of the house woke an hour before the front did — a scrape of grate, a kettle, the particular cold that lives in a stairwell before anybody has opened a curtain.

What the Winter Took

On May 21, 1918, the notices were of another kind: suddenly, at 1822 Pine st., the widow of Henry C. Davis, funeral services and interment private. She died in these rooms in the last spring of the war, and the door that had been advertised open on winter afternoons was closed to everyone but family.

Her daughter did not stop. Within a year Martha Davis was hosting a congressional-district meeting of the national party at four in the afternoon — the luncheon tickets, the treasurer's ledger and the banners all moving through this block twice a day, in daylight, in ordinary shoes. The vote came the summer after next.

I have felt brides hesitate and mourners come down heavy, and those years had a tread of their own: quick, level, unhurried by weather. The parlor windows are tall enough to throw a whole afternoon across the floor, and when the door shuts behind you the hall still holds that hush — the one that means something has just been decided.