[Dialogue] Voting Privilege

[Wilson Priscilla]

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."



Priscilla Wilson
TeamTech Press
Mission Hills, KS 66208
pwilson at teamtechinc.com



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