Fearless Females: Right to Vote

In honor of Woman's History month I post the below.  I did not write it...I do not know who wrote it. I originally received it via e-mail just before the 2008 presidential election.  I've checked on snopes.com and it's all true. 

Seems like many have an excuse for not voting - 'my candidate is not winning in the polls, so why bother?', 'no one stands for all the issues that I feel are important, so I'll not vote', 'my vote doesn't really count, the decision is made before I even have a chance to get to the polls!'  There are MANY excuses for NOT voting but lets all remember what our ancestors before us did to make voting a RIGHT, not an option or a chore as so many make it today....especially the woman's right to vote.

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; many of them lived less than a hundred years ago.

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

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 Burns (right), 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 (left) 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' - November 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 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 (right), 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.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf

So, refresh my memory. Some women (and men) won't vote because- -why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? We have other things to do? It's raining? 

© copyright 2010, all rights reserved, Mary Post Warren