[Dialogue] Voting

[Janice Ulangca]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: don or linda anesi 
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:; 
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2008 8:07 PM
Subject: Women Vote!!


  History Lesson on the Privilege of Voting

(A short history lesson on the privilege of voting...in the U.S.)

The women were innocent  and defenseless. 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 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 cell mate, 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 rote.  
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  will run the movie periodically before releasing it 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." 


**************************
Janice Ulangca
3413 Stratford Drive
Vestal, NY  13850
607-797-4595
aulangca at stny.rr.com
***************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20080317/b7b12c3d/attachment.html