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For the Ladies.
-------Original Message-------
Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 07:49:19
Subject: DPFAR: Fw: A short history lesson
This is something to pass on to everyone you know.
Denele
A short history lesson on the privilege of voting...
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 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
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 righ! t 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."
Please 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.
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