AUTOBIOGRAPHY WEEK: We're taking submissions / Women's Right to Vote

October 6 /08

Abby and I are now taking submissions for Autobiography Week. We hope you've all been preparing your posts and enjoying your trips down Memory Lane. We need time to process all the entries so they'll be ready to be published by Oct. 20. So please email them to either one of us as soon as you can.

Thanks.

We're at:

chef.boxer@yahoo.ca

crabbyabby5827@yahoo.com

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Since it's election time here in Canada, and in the United States, Mama wanted to share this email she got from her friend Ruth. You'll see how far women have come on this continent in a very short time. It's a good reminder why women should vote in the upcoming elections.

This is the story of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, only 90 years ago.

It wasn't until 1920 that American women were granted the right of suffrage.

The Suffragettes, the women who demanded the right to vote were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the right to cast their ballots. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. These were not the women who set fire to mailboxes and planted bombs. These were peaceful protesters.

Forty prison guards, wielding clubs with their warden's blessing, went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic."

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

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Lucy Burns

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.

Dora Lewis

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 a pail. Their food - all of it colourless slop - was infested with worms.

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Alice Paul

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. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf

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?

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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, and said, "One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie. 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 released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bingo 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.

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, if you are so inclined, 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.

In Canada, the women of Manitoba were granted the right to vote in 1916, thanks to the efforts of Nellie McClung and her colleagues. The rest of Canadian women were allowed to vote in federal elections when the Women's Franchise Act was passed in 1918. However, it was not until 1940 that the women of Quebec had the right to vote in provincial elections - the last province to accord them this right of suffrage. And aboriginal women couldn’t vote in federal elections until 1960.b

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What would President Wilson say if he knew that today a woman is running for Vice President and that another woman ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination? We've come a long, long way, baby!