In Women We Trust to VOTE

I never considered myself a feminist, I always saw the world as a 50/50 proposition. That said, the majority of the things I take for granted today happened because women could vote.

The following email is making the rounds again. Each year I'm struck by how long and what physical pain it took to take half the American population seriously.

Have you voted yet? 

 

Iron Jawed Angels

This  is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90  years ago.  Remember,  it was not until 1920  that  women were granted the right to go to the polls and  vote.

The  women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed  nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs  asking for the vote. 

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

They  beat Lucy Burns, 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?  ...."

 

Comments

[Coral Rose]

Thanks Mary for posting this!!!!

[InWomenWeTrust]

We walked over to the voting station and handing them our ballots that we filled out early, cut didn't mail on time - again...