Thoughts in Jail
Prisoners are we,
American citizens imprisoned
For daring in the name of Democracy
To protest against the continued denial
Of the right of self-government
To twenty millions of the American people.
We lie in a dungeon
Long ago abandoned and condemned,
Just as politically we are held
Imprisoned in a subjection
Abandoned and condemned
By every other nation of English speech and spirit.
Painfully raising my head,
I look down the long row
Of gray-blanketed heaps.
Under every heap a woman,
Weak, sick, but determined,
Twenty gray fortresses of determination.
This poem is in the public domain.
Katharine Rolston Fisher
Katharine Rolston Fisher was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1871. A suffrage activist and writer, she is thought to have been brought on as an assistant editor of The Suffragist in 1915. She was arrested for picketing for voting rights in 1917 and was sentenced to thirty days in the Occoquan workhouse. Fisher also worked as the recording secretary of the Washington, D.C. branch of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; as a government clerk at the Suffragist House; and at the U.S. War Risk Bureau.