Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Why Women Should Vote

I'm going to start by saying that I'm not a "burn my bra feminist". Not even close to it, actually. But, I received an email this morning that reminded me of the freedoms women have in this country that we take for granted. During one of my last (of many) years at TCC, I did a report on Alice Paul, and though most political leaders and activists bore the crap out of me, I found the story fascinating. The story circulates every year as election time draws near, and every year, I read it again, just as interested as the year before. I urge you to Google it. Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Iron Jawed Angels. Also, watch the movie. Oh, yea....VOTE!!!

Here's the story. Enjoy.

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.

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