I voted today, having registered to vote in Colorado on the last possible day for this election. It was totally an accident, I admit. It just happened to be the day we went to get new Colorado drivers' licenses.
While I know that voting is a privilege and something to be prized, I often think of it as an item on my to-do list, a chore along with ironing and dusting. A thing that gets pushed to the bottom of the list if something more interesting comes up.
I received the following email this morning from a friend--it renewed my apprecation for voting. Take a look.
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It’s easy to forget that this happened less than 100 years ago...
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. 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? Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.
What would those women think of the way we use--or don't use--our right to vote now? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but all of us. Make the right to vote become valuable all over again.
In the end, 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 know the doctor refused. Alice Paul was strong, he is quoted as saying, and brave. That didn't make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men:
"Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."
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.
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