Elizabeth Selden Rogers
Elizabeth Selden (White) Rogers (born July 23, 1868, date of death unknown) was the wife of a prominent thyroid specialist John Rogers, and was the great-great-granddaughter of Roger Sherman. She was a civic reformer working to improve the New York public schools, and to also win suffrage for women in the state of New York first and later joining the national suffrage movement.
She was chairman of the Advisory Council of the National Woman's Party, and was one of the most forceful speakers in the "Prison Special" bus tour across the country; during which suffragists spoke of their experience in jail. Rogers was arrested on July 14, 1917 for picketing in front of the United States White House, and was sentenced to sixty (60) days in Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia; but she was quickly pardoned by US President Woodrow Wilson after just three (3) days.
Elizabeth Selden Rogers, editorial entitled "Why We Withdrew," in Women's Political World, 1915
"A great deal is said of the value of co-operation of all societies and the economy of not duplicating work. While believing heartily in a certain amount and kind of co-operation, we are not blind to the fact that too complete unity may result. in stagnation... The [Women's Political) Union believes that the existence of many suffrage societies is an evidence of the vitality of the movement, and that the friendly rivalry of such societies results in more and better work being done, that it gives the freedom necessary to growth, affording scope for individuality, and allowing personality to count....
To those of our members who are worrying over this co-operate (sic) idea, we would point out that if in the past four or five years the Women's Political Union in New York City had been bound by a two-thirds vote of a campaign committee, like the one now formed, we would never have had a parade, or an outdoor meeting, or a campaign against certain enemies in the Legislature."
She was also the sister of Mabel Wellington (White) Stimson, the wife of US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, she was also the maternal granddaughter of Union Major General Amos Beebe Eaton.
SOURCE
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 367.