Why Women Should Vote

Why Women Should Vote!

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How quickly we forget........If we ever knew......Why women should vote!

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 nontheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

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 breath.

They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, hitting her head on an iron bed, knocking her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards as grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, twisting, pinching, 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.....were 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 duty? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It is raining?

Last week, I watched an HBO movie, 'Iron Jawed Angels' (2004). It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so I can pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to admit I needed the reminder.

The actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting felt more like an obligation rather than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie, 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 the younger women. The right to vote should be very valuable to us.

Every woman should watch this movie! We are not voting in the numbers we should and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade the psychiatrist to declare Ann Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. 'Alice Paul was strong and brave', he said. 'That didn't make her crazy.'
The doctor admonished the men, 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for, by these very courageous women. Whether you vote Democrat, Republican, or Independent party -- Remember to vote!

History is being made!!

(From the gov. records--from suffrage)
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B&SD