More About Those Suffrage Hikers

Gossips continues to be fascinated by the suffragettes who hiked from New York City to Albany, stopping to spend Christmas in Hudson, and so apparently was the Hudson Evening Register a hundred years ago. Two weeks after the hikers reached Albany and presented their message to Governor Sulzer, this article appeared in the Register, on January 14, 1913.

WALKING SURPRISES SUFFRAGISTS.

Some of the suffragist "hikers" who walked from New York city to Albany to attract public attention to their political missions, have been much surprised at the physical effects of their long tramp.

It appears that these women, militant and strenuous though they were, expected to lose weight and run down physically. On the contrary they all gained flesh. As one of them said at Albany, "Imagine getting fat on a tramp, but we ate like camels all the way. It was terrible the way we devoured food at every cross-roads. Beef, oatmeal, eggs, apples and even pork and corn-bread: everything that was given us." Another of the suffragists said that she expected to lose flesh, but although she had weighed only 116 pounds all her life, she found on reaching Albany that she tipped the scales at 130.

All of which shows what good exercise walking is and how good for health and strength it is to have good exercise. If more people had personal experience of long tramps there would be fewer doctors' bills to pay, and the undertakers would shortly find themselves facing hard times.

Especially for women of the suffragist type, who take life and its cares seriously and subject themselves to a good deal of mental strain in connection with the cause dear to their hearts, it is a great thing to go out into the open air and take enough of real bodily exercise to get tired and sleepy and hungry. It is fine for such representatives of complicated modern life to know how appetizing plain fare can be.

The militant New York suffragist may not accomplish the immediate political results sought at Albany, but they will find themselves capable of more effective physical work, with less risk to their health and strength, because they walked nearly 150 miles up the Hudson valley.