New Britain Herald Newspaper, May 3, 1927, Page 18

Remarkfibly Interesting Wooing Which Began Soon After the Washington Statesman Heard A wed- ding day photo- graph of Senator Dill and his bride NTIL a certain committee of | women waited upon him three years ago and tried to wheedle or stampede him into changing his vote, United States Senator Clarence C. Dill of the State of Washington had never thought seriously of matrimony. Not for himself, at least. “A man who has his way to make and is politically ambitious has no busi- ness even meditating upon such a thing,” he said once. “Wives are an expense and a distrac- tion, no matter what the sentimentalists say, and a wiseacre of old pointed out that ‘he travels fastest who travels alone.”” To the Senator, the charming women he met in his goings-about in Washing- ton, D. C., were interesting specimens of another and most commendable sex, never possible partners of the joys and sorrows and knocks and boosts that make up his life as a tribune of the people. Until that aforesaid committee of women waited upon Senator Clarence C. Dill of Washington three years ago, Miss Rosalie Gardiner Jones of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, had never spoken of matrimony without a slight touch of derision. And never had she thought of it as among the serious possibilities of an in- teresting life for herself. Pretty, financially independent and politically minded, she found that she was quite sufficient unto herself, and thought of men as interruptions and distractions. She was nationally prominent in half a dozen women’s organizations, and found her greatest thrill in working for peace, the better record of labor, and other social reforms. Back in the days of the suffragette crusade, she had been an outstanding leader, and had won the title of “Gen- eral” of the embattled women when she led a group of militant suffragists upon Albany in 1912 to demand their rights from Governor William Sulzer. All of which makes the commonplace announcement that Miss Rosalie Gar- diner Jones and Senator Clarence C. Dill were married the other day of rather more than ordinary interest. It is always a fillip to the interest of the people on the side lines when a woman who has scorned the pretensions and claims of the “stronger sex” and a man who has been & bit of a woman- Rosalie Jones’ Able Appeal for Interna- tional Peace and Finally Ended in the Famous Feminist hater .in his way fall in love. Such romances are almost always a little pep- pier and spicier and more exciting than the prosaic mating of humans of the sturdy oak and clinging vine variety. And the story of the hard-boiled Sena- tor from the West and the independent suffragette from Long Island is no ex- ception to this rule. It began with a fight—a real, old- fashioned fight, with the lady giving him a piece of her mind, and the Senator stoutly asserting his masculine inde- pendence and defying her to do her worst. It was as an advocate of the Women’s International Peace Movement that Miss Jones visited Washington three years ago, to do a little lady-like lobbying for a pet project of her league. After she and her sister lobbyists had shopped around for support, someone told them that there were several men in the Sen- ate who were apparently unalterably op- posed to their scheme, and their support was indispensable. “See Dill of Washington,” suggested one friendly soul, and the ladies went to Dill’s office to see what was to be done about him. Right at the start he got them mad by keeping them cooling their heels in the ante-room of his office for the better part of an hour. They were not used to such treatment. “One would think we were book agents,” stormed Miss Jones, acting as spokesman for the group, when finally they were admitted to his presence. “I prefer book agents to many women lobbyists,” said the Senator, truthfully but untactfully, and the fight was on. All the diplomatic things the ladies had thought up vanished from their minds under the lash of his caustic criti- cism of their stand, and Miss Jones was especially bitter in depouncing him for his attitude. It was just as the Senator had always said—women insisted on getting per- sonal about their politics and losing their tempers, and getting full of moral in- dignation and whatnot. While thus reflecting, his observant eye was taking in the details of the charming pink and white costume of Miss Jones, and his brain was registering the fact that she was one of the few women to whom anger was becoming. WDERWOOD € UNDENH00D- “General” Rosalie Jones, in the “Votes for Women” car in which she trav- eled far and wide on her stirring suffrage crusades Another pho- tograph of the Senator’s bride Her dark and piquant face could flush to advantage, and her eyes could get bright and full of danger signals with- out becoming hard. It may be said just here that Senator Dill was thirty-nine years old at the time of that stormy con- ference, and had never before been driven to take thorough stock of such a - charming but Jetermined lady lobbyist as “the General.” In any case, accord- ing to those who ac- companied the young woman on the pilgrim- age, it came to nothing, and they left, Miss Jones perfectly polite but scornful, the Senator flushed, angry and interested in spite of himself. Next day he began to make inquiries about the delegation, and planned out a campaign to meet the woman who had dared him in his den and destroyed his senatorial poise. He went about asking where the “lady in pink” was, and gave various hostesses glowing descriptions of her in her frock and the rest of her scenery, and by the time he managed to be formally introduced, it was being said in the drawing rooms of the capital that “Clarence Dill had fallen at last, and fallen pretty hard.” “It was a case of love at first sight,” Miss Jones said afterward. “At least on his side. I was too angry to feel any such sentiment that day he turned down my committee.” In discussing his feelings, just before he was married, the Senator said he was as much surprised as anybody else when he cayght himself falling in love with “the General.” “All my life,” he said, “I had had a vague lack of enthusiasm for women in politics—I mean women political leaders. “My attitude, if 1 had taken the trouble to analyze it, would have proven to be that they sacrificed something of the charm of their sex to get political leadership. Don’t misunderstand. I am not a Victorian, believing all women should remain in the home. I have met women political leaders for whose men- tal attainments I had and still have the sincerest respect. But never, until Miss Jones bawled me out for thwarting her committee had 1 met a woman who, for me, combined charm and political acumen. “Even angry, as she was, she showed a keenness of intellect that won my ad- miration, as it would have won the ad- miration of any thinking man. “Still her mind, keen as it was, re- mained distinctly feminine, and full of the charm of femininity. I may add, its unexpectedness. She thought of more things to argue abrut in fifteen minutes in my office, and more ways of calling me a dodo, in a nice way, than a male political opponent would have conceived in a couple of days. “And, of course, she is attractive, and knows how to dress in order to accen- tuate that fact. And, being human, I was not above noticing that.” 'The winning of Miss Jones was not something to be accomplished in be- tween speeches, as Senator Dill discov- ered affer a brisk campaign of a month or two had landed him nowhere. To begin with, according to mutual friends, he had to explain that he was not anti- suffrage, but simply found that most prominent suffrage leaders had none of that well-advertised “womanly appeal” for him and left him cold. Miss Jones, sr Mrs. Dill, to give her her new name, is not, physically, the popular conception of a suffrage leader or lobbyist or a militant feminist. Look- ing her over, one would say she was in- terested in afternoon teas and theater parties and tennis and golf and clothes. Maybe in worth-while men. One would never, by any chance, size her up as the sort of young woman to have strong convictions about the condition of the workers in the steel mills, the fate of the League of Nations, or the sufferings of the submerged tenth in the great cities of the land. But her interest in those matters is as real as anything in her life—as real as her love for the gentleman from Washington—and before she consented to become Mrs. Dill she made her posi- tion unmistakable. In the first place, she insisted on the word “obey” being omitted from the marriage service when they were wed in the Episcopal Church on the Jones estate at Cold Spring Harbor. “It is not a word a self-respecting woman of this century likes to give a man,” she said. . “Mutual understanding, affection and consideration govern the relations of husbands and wives. So long as we love and honor, the word obey won’t be needed. And if we should stop, the word wouldn’t mean anything.” In the second place, she refused to be given away at the altar. “I'm solely responsible for what I’'m doing,” she as- serted. “Nobody can give me away. I’m independent, and my own boss. How ridiculous for a brother or somebody to hand me over to my new lord and The former Rosalie Gardiner Jones, the noted feminist leader, who is now the wife of the Hon. Clarence C. Dill, 'U. S. Senator from the State of Washington master, like a woman of the harem! I'll give myself away.” Before he slipped a ring upon her finger, Miss Jones further informed her suitor that, while she would help him en- tertain, in Washington, Spokane or New York, she would not consent to be a social butterfly, and would continue to interest herself in the political and so- ciological problems to which she has de- voted so much of her life. And she got _ him to agree to allow her to use her own name, Rosalies Gardiner Jones, in those political and social service activities. “I believe the Senator is interested in my work,” she said to former comrades of the suffragette wars. “I am quite sure that I am interested in his. Mutual interest is the basis of lasting love.” Among the guests at the Jones-Dill wedding was former Governor Sulzer, who once received her on the steps' of the capitol at Albany, N. Y., and heard her deliver a forceful argument in be- half of women’s rights—all of them, but particularly the right to vote. “Still believe as you did that day?” he asked her. “There’s no reason for me to change,” she assured him. “No more cause for me to give up my convictions because I'm in love with a man than there is for him to change his party or his stand on a public question because he’s married a wife who has convictions as strong as his own.” Rosalie Gardiner Jones-Dill is several years younger -than her husband, and was left one-third of a $5,000,000 estate when her father died. Besides petition- ing Governor Sulzer, she headed delega- tions of women who worked on Presi- dent Wilson and other noted public men in the days just before the suffrage amendment became law. Senator Clarence Dill was immedi- ately dubbed the “baby of the Senate” when he took his office, but that refer- ence was to his youthfulness, not to any failure to w his way about. He is one of the ablest young men in Wash- ington. Born in Ohio, he was first a newspaperman, then = school teacher, and ultimately was admitted to the bar in the State of Washington. Copyright, 1927, oy Jehnson Features, Ine 2 h) 4) (N, “?‘ .} —_—— [> ] (&'\\«,‘ g@;‘ (o Wy ) " it /.?