Just yesterday, I went to the movies and while ordering a cafe latte, the barrista and were chatting. I told her that I’d been to the Obama rally and how great it was, and the young lady behind the counter sheepishly admitted that she was not yet registered to vote.
Oh, how sad. Really. That there are still Americans so naive that they don’t believe that they could loose their country, and so don’t exercise one of the most precious and hard-won rights that we have - the right to cast a vote and have a voice. Natacha says that Americans have forgotten what it is like to have no freedom - and her being from west central Africa I’d say that’s true. She can’t believe that some people here don’t vote.
So, today, when I’d received the following email from another friend (thanks, Peg) about womens’ suffrage, I had to add it to the blog.
If you are a man and reading this, then please encourage all the women you know to go vote their conscience.
BTW: I told the young lady where, nearby to her work, that she could go register and that there was a deadline, and that I really, really wanted her to have a voice in the process.
maven
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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?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s new 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. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more wrote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.Sometimes it was inconvenient.
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was—with herself.
‘One thought 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 released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco 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 is 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, if you are so inclined, 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. Remember to vote.
In Canada, the women of Manitoba got the right to vote in 1916 thanks to the efforts of Nellie McClung and her colleagues. The rest of Canadian women were allowed to vote in federal elections when the Women’s Franchise Act was passed in 1918. However, it was not until 1940 that the women of Quebec got the right to vote in provincial elections - the last province to accord them this right of suffrage.
Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 15:48 
