From prearranged sources I was receiving messages and notes each evening, and reports on Ethel’s pulse and temperature. Thus I learned her vision was becoming affected and her heart was beginning to miss beats, due to lack of liquids. “Going without water was pretty bad,” she said herself. “At night the woman whose duty it was to go up and down the corridors to give the prisoners a drink if they wanted it stopped right by my cell and cried, ‘Water! Water!’ till it seemed as if I could not stand it. And on the other side of me was the sound of the river through the window.”
Nobody was allowed to visit Ethel but J.J., who, as her lawyer, could not well be refused. But reporters have their own mysterious ways of getting what they want. The _World_ man succeeded in reaching her. It was not on the whole a successful interview, because she did not know who he was, but it did have one important result—it confirmed at first hand our statements as to the seriousness of her condition.
In the midst of my anxiety over Ethel, my own trial opened January 29th in the same bare, smoky, upstairs Brooklyn court in which she had appeared. Justices John J. Freschi, Italian, Moses Herrmann, Jewish, and George J. O’Keefe, Irish, sat on the bench. Judge Freschi, a rather young man, presided, and on him we pinned our hopes. We did not expect anything of old Judge Herrmann except that, because he was Jewish, he might be broad-minded. As to Judge O’Keefe we had no illusions.
No less than thirty of the mothers of Brownsville had been subpoenaed by the prosecution, but about fifty arrived—some equipped with fruit, bread, pacifiers, and extra diapers, others distressed at having had to spend carfare, timid at the thought of being in court, hungry because no kosher food could be obtained near by. Nevertheless, all smiled and nodded at me reassuringly.
Formerly, a few women of wealth but of liberal tendencies had been actively concerned in the movement, but now some who were prominent socially were coming to believe on principle that birth control should not be denied to the masses. The subject was in the process of ceasing to be tagged as radical and revolutionary, and becoming admittedly humanitarian.