How Women Got To Vote - Democratic Underground

1monster

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Mon Mar-24-08 06:15 PM
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How Women Got To Vote

I received this in e-mail today from my sister-in-law...

How Women Got To Vote

A short history lesson on the privilege of voting...

The women were innocent & defenseless. And by the end of the night,
they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs & their warden's
blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of
'obstructing sidewalk traffic'.

They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head
and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They
hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron
bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was
dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the
guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching,
twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden
at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a
lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket
Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their
food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the
leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a
chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until
she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was
smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why,
exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote
doesn't matter? It's raining?

Recently there was a sparel attended screening of HBO's movie 'Iron
Jawed Angels'. It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women
waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say.

All these years later, the actual act of voting has become less
personalfor us, more rote. Frankly, voting often feels more like an obligation
than a privilege. Sometimes it is inconvenient.

My friend, Wendy, who studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too.
When she stopped by to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with
herself. 'One thou ght kept coming back to me as I watched that
movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use--or don't
use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just
younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn. The right to
vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.' HBO will run
the movie periodically before releasing it on video and DVD. I wish all
history, social studies & government teachers would include the movie
in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunko night, too, and anywhere
else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but
we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little
shock therapy is in order.

It i s jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade
a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be
permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor
refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make
her crazy. The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often
mistaken for insanity.'

Please pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and
vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very
courageous women.