If you are a woman and not voting today, READ THIS

The Courage in Women; Night of Terror- Nov. 15, 1917

The women were 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 33 women 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--gruel--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.

So, refresh my memory. Some 50 million women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining? Are our packed schedules so richly rewarding, our healthcare so good, our right to exercise autonomy over our bodies and choose when to have, or not have, children so secure that we can afford to simply blow off voting?


The battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say happened during my grandmother's lifetime. We still do not have the right of full citizenship that men take for granted. Voting sometimes feels more like an obligation; rather than a privilege. Sometimes it is inconvenient. I am ashamed to say I need reminders of just how recent and how bloody the battles were that allowed me to have this privilege at all. We need sharp reminders of just what happens when we ARE NOT allowed a voice.

So soon we forget...

It is jarring to know Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare suffragist leader Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized and taken out of the spotlight of the battle for women's right to vote. And it is inspiring to know the doctor refused. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men saying:

"Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."




If you have not registered to vote, do it out of honor for the women who so recently fought for your right to be heard. Do it out of respect for yourself. And VOTE NOVEMBER 4th. Vote because it is amazing to imagine the outcome of the election if all 50 million women who DIDN'T vote last time decided not to ignore the most precious right we have as citizens.

oops.....I accidentally read it.

General and specific in the same instant....