Why Women Can Vote

As you the readers know very well, your favorite author is quite the political enthusiast.  Not sure she has marched, but I do wonder about her mother in the 20’s.  Miss McDaniel had moved around a bit with her two brothers and I suspect she was a very independent lady.    As I see the ads for the various candidates and I received this article.  It got me wondering about my Grandmother.  The article purports to be a true story.

It was only 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote, so why is it that today in 2014 that we approach this so nonchalantly.

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.’

  Some of what they endured were like Lucy Burns, who was chained to the cell bars with her hands  above her head and left hanging for the night bleeding and gasping for air.  Then there was Dora Lewis who was hurled into a dark cell, when her had was smashed against an iron bed and knocked 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. 

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

I am told “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 suffragist imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.  The very idea,  Woodrow Willson was only allowed to stay in the white house and he certainly did not own it is this author’s view.  We the American people own the White House and it truly belongs to us.  For weeks the women’s only water came from an open pail.  Their food – all of it colorless slop – was infested with worms.

After reading about these women and hearing of their plight I am convicted and totally ashamed that I sometimes have felt the act of voting was less personal.  Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.  Sometimes it was inconvenient and I had to alter my schedule just to be able to vote.

A friend who saw the HBO movie,  ‘Iron Jawed Angels,’  talked about it and she was angry.  She was angry with herself.  She said she kept thinking to herself “What would 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.’

I understand the movie is on DVD.  I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum and it should also be shown on Bunco/Bingo 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.

Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk, Conn.  Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner, ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’

So, refresh MY memory.  Some women won’t vote this year because – Why, exactly?    Is it carppol duties?  We have to get to work?  Our vote doesn’t matter?  It’s raining?  I’m so busy…I’ve got so much on my plate!

We should be ashamed that we are such wimps when the women before us fought and endured such hardship for us today to be able to vote!  Now ladies, get up on those cute little duffs and decide who you will vote for this election season.  This is just another facet of County Living.