SwiftVets.com

[Fort Campbell]

A short history lesson on the privilege of voting...

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. Additionalaffidavits 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 andDVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco 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.

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."





Please stop and think about all of the women that you know today. They may not be aware of what these women endured so that they could go to the Polls and cast a vote. Please pass this on to all the women you know We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women.

[jataylor11]

I vote. I have voted in just about every election city, state, --- always the National elections for the last 27 years, since I turned 18.

On what will I base my vote this year? --

My right to choose because I cannot take adequate responsibility for my reproductive life before life begins? Nope.

This year I will base my vote of the woman of Afghanistan who are now back in school.

This year I will base my vote on the right of woman to work outside of the home throughout the world.

This year I will base my vote on defeating fanatical Islam that views woman as property and rape the equivalent of a marriage proposal.

This year I will base my vote on the hearts of the woman in Breslen Russia -- who made the difficult choices to returning back into that gym to be with the children the could not carry out.

This year I will base my vote on the making sure that democracy comes to the rest of the world so that the harm caused those women 87 years ago --- AND 3 MILES from my home --- does not happen to other members of my gender throughout the world.