[Oe List ...] Fwd: [dmin-list] That's why they called it suffrage

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

Forwarded by J. McGuire.  Sorry, I didn't receive a source.



Remember how women got the vote...


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 helpless 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 slops--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. There was a time when I knew these 

women well. I met them in college--not in my required American 

history courses, which barely mentioned them, but in women's history 

class. That's where I found the irrepressibly brave Alice Paul. Her

large, brooding eyes seemed fixed on my own as she stared out from 

the page.  "Remember!" she silently beckoned.


Remember. I thought I always would. I registered voters throughout 

college and law school, worked on congressional and presidential 

campaigns until I started writing for newspapers. When Geraldine 

Ferraro ran for vice president, I took my 9-year-old son to meet 

her. "My knees are shaking," he whispered after shaking her 

hand. "I'm never going to wash this hand again."


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 even 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 world 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 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 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." >>