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A short history lesson on the privilege of voting...
This is the true story of how women earned the right to vote.........

                  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.

                  So, refresh my memory. Some 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?

                  Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening
                  of HBO's new movie "Iron
                  Jawed Angels." It is a graphic depiction of the
                  battle these women waged so that I could pull the
                  curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I
                  am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

                  All these years later, voter registration is still
                  my passion. But the actual act of voting had become
                  less personal for me, more rote.

                  Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation
                  than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

                  My friend, Wendy, who is my age and studied women's
                  history, saw the HBO
                  movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk
                  about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself.
                  "One thought kept coming back to me as I watched
                  that movie," she said. "What would those 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."

                  HBO will run the movie periodically before releasing
                  it on video and DVD.
                  wish all history, social studies and government
                  teachers would include the movie in their
                  curriculum. I want it shown on Bunko 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
                  think a little shock therapy is in order.

                  It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his
                  cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare
                  Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently
                  institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the
                  doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and
                  brave. That didn't make her crazy. The
                  doctor admonished the men:

                  "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."

                  Author unknown

                  **********

Last modified: November 16, 2007

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