Document 27: Florence Kitchelt to Jane Grant, 6 August 1945, Florence Ledyard Cross Kitchelt Papers, 1885-1961, A-61, Box 6, Folder 147, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 2 pp.

   Kitchelt explained to her friend why Alice Hamilton's opinion mattered so much to her. Jane Grant (1892-1972), co-founder of The New Yorker, was a journalist and feminist and was active in New York City cultural and political circles between the 1920s and 1950s.[31]

August 6, 1945

Miss Jane Grant,
Litchfield
Connecticut

My dear Jane Grant:

   Your forthright encounter with a particular dragon revives courage in all the rest of us. For a person who weighs barely a hundred pounds you have outdone even St. George himself.

   Miss Adams is in the office with me today and we both wonder how you were able to study your trouble because it is so hard to get hold of books or pamphlets with factual information. Did you mesmerize your doctor?

   My mother years ago had the same operation and never had a bit of trouble thereafter! So I trust you may expect the same excellent result.

   My dear, I haven't a friend left in the world, except you. The National Woman's Party thinks I am trying to wreck it, the opponents have not quite made up their minds. Surely you will be interested to see the splendid letter received this morning from Dr. Alice Hamilton[A]. Please return it. You may know that she wrote a long article in the June Ladies Home Journal explaining the many industrial laws necessary to safeguard women from industrial hazards; but as you see she based it all on the supposition that the National Woman's Party knew what it was talking about when it said that equal laws must be identical laws.

   This morning also there is a letter from Alice Paul who believes this statement quoted by Chase Going Woodhouse. "If the Constitution is so amended as to prohibit all discrimination in the law against women, it is plain that it will also prohibit all discrimination in their favor." This seems to me like nonsense and has so been dubbed by one of my legal friends.

   I don't know what I am accomplishing by being a one-man sideshow but I am rather enjoying myself.

   Nothing but good fortune will come to such a courageous persons as my friend Jane Grant.

[Florence L.C. Kitchelt]

A. See Document 25. In that letter Alice Hamilton, noted researcher on industrial diseases and long time opponent of the ERA, responded to a letter from Kitchelt arguing that the amendment would "not do away with protective laws for women." Hamilton seemed a bit skeptical, responding, "I fervently hope that you are right, but I am still a bit doubtful."
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