This is an excerpt from a personal blog I had several years ago. This post first appeared before the 2004 elections, when I was serving as a local precinct captain. Please spread this around to women beyond OS if you have a mind to:
This little PSA is not about telling you WHO to vote for, only that you should VOTE.
This is especially true if you are a woman.
One of the most underrepresented groups at the voting booth are women between the ages of 18 and 35. In the local precinct that I work for my party, a precinct of roughly 1800 registrered voters, do you know how many women didn't vote in the 2000 election? Six hundred and eighty three. Yup, that's right. About one-third of my precinct.
Do you understand that less than 100 years ago, women weren't even ALLOWED to vote? The conventional wisdom was that women were "too emotional" and "didn't wnat to be bothered with such things as governmnet."
Do you know what women had to go through to get the right to vote? For 70 years women met and petitioned to be involved in government. To have merely the basic right to choose the people who made the laws that governed them. They marched, and finally, picketed the White House. They were jailed for having the audacity to remind Woodrow Wilson that even though they were "fighting for democracy" overseas, they were neglecting democracy for the nation's women. The "Silent Sentinels" as they were called, were the first non-violent civil disobedients in the United States.
Many of the Protesters were arrested when the U.S. entered World War I. Alice Paul, Rose Winslow and others were arrested and sent to the Occoquan workhouse. When Alice Paul commenced a hunger strike, she was moved to the psychiatric ward and force fed with a tube. Three times a day for three weeks straight, a tube was forced into her esophagus, and used to force feed her.
"Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding. I was vomiting continuously during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere that is painful. Don't let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul vomits much. I do, too, except when I'm not nervous, as I have been every time against my will. We think of the coming feeding all day. It is horrible." -- Rose Winslow, November 1917, from prison.
"At night, in the early morning, all through the day there were cries and shrieks and moans from the patients. It was terrifying. One particularly meloncholy moan used to keep up hour after hour with the regularity of a heart beat. I said to myself, 'Now I have to endure this. I have got to live through this somehow.' I pretend these moans are the noise of an elevated train, beginning faintly in the distance and getting louder as it comes nearer." -- Alice Paul, from prison, November 1917.
Other prisoners who did not get moved to the psychiatric ward fared no better. Under orders from W. H. Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.
Former officers in the workhouse testified that the food at the workhouse was often infested with worms and maggots.
Read this excerpt from Winslow's prison diary.
This was all less than 100 years ago. This is not ancient history. Imagine being told that because you are a woman, you are not intelligent enough to vote. This happened to our grandmothers. Our grandmother's generation fought for this right. Women like Alice Paul and Rose Winslow and Lucy Burns suffered in prison to make sure you would have it.
Voting may take some time, you may have to stand in line. Boo hoo. Women were willing to be force fed with a tube for three weeks straight to do the thing that you take for granted -- to go into a voting booth on election day and vote.
Are you going to be the one to say that their sacrifice was for nothing? Because if you don't vote, that is precisely what you are saying.
What more is there to say? VOTE!
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Comments
This is fine, fine work. Thank you for the poignant reminder. I may have a photo I can share with you. I live just south of Seneca Falls, and I've taken both my girls up there to see it.
I would love to see this message spread around to as many people as possible, particualrly young students.
And I'd love to see the photo....
Lea, your post was very much the inspiration behind my digging this thing up out of the archives. Thanks.
Faith, kinda blows you away, doesn't it? Still rocks me hard every time I think about it. I cannot imagine dishonoring these women by not voting now, and when I hear a young woman tell me she isn't voting I get ill.
here's another resource you might be interested in. Not directly related to women's suffrage, but about women's participation in labor unions. This particular thing is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
Triangle
I haven't missed a vote since I was eligible. I don't really know why except that my parents always voted. This really brought home why it's important to honor the right to vote.
Not because they don't care, because they just don't know. Great post!
Lorraine, the Triangle fire was indeed a watershed in both the women's movement and the movement to outlaw child labor. Thanks for the reminder!
Amy, thank you, as always.
MaryT., thanks for forwarding! I really would LOVE to see more women learn about this.
I'm also torn between wanting my daughter (& son) to be gender-blind - to know without any second thoughts that she can do anything a boy can do - but also to have her respect and understand the work women did for suffrage, for Title IX, for equal pay and to know we're not there yet and how fragile it is.
I guess I can take solace in the fact that it'd be laughable to my kids that a mommy voted for someone just because daddy told her to.
I suppose this is part of my rage over Sarah Palin; She IS a woman wiithout being pro-woman; she would not be a good proponent of women's rights, almost all of which were hard fought and hard earned. If you read Salon today, it's clear she's not entirely clear on regular Constitutional rights, either. There are men in Saudi Arabia who have a more compassionate and modern attitude toward women than she has in the cases of rape and incest. What good could possibly come for either mother or child of forcing a woman to carry a child she did not want and perhaps could not care for when conceived in such awful circumstances, ?
200 plus votes out of 900 possible. The three weeks of feeding tube is as an irritated thumbnail compared to the horror of a 30% turn out.
I am afraid to ask, but the male turn out likely wasn't much better, was it?
Well for their 'trouble', they got Bush. Except for me living under the same yoke, they got what they deserved.
Dean
shiral, Palin is an insult to women like Alice Paul. Palin would rather pander to McCain's desires to use her based on her gender than fight for other women. She wouldn't suffer a hangnail for a sister, much less go on a hunger strike.
Dean, actually, the male turnout was higher. Much higher. 1800 is the total of ALL voters in the precinct, not just the women.
And Sandra, thanks! Do we dare start planning that inauguration trip?
this is an important post.
In Bloomington, one of our citizens became the first governor of Colorado. His Name was John Routt. this is taken from the Colorado State Archives:
"Routt gained political favor, at least from much of the female citizenry, because of his support for women's suffrage. He arranged a speaking tour of Colorado for Susan B. Anthony and personally directed and escorted her on her trip. His wife, Eliza, became the first registered female voter after women received the right to vote in 1893."
We are all thrilled to have several of the houses John Routt built in the 1840's. He was a carpenter-contractor prior to the Civil War.