Obstructing Sidewalk Traffic

I've always been honored by my right to vote as a citizen of our country. I love the whole process, well except for the media hype part. I enjoy the little newspaper voting booklets, reading and marking them up. I love the rickety booths that threaten to collapse and the smiling volunteers who hand me an I've voted sticker.

A recent online article about The Women's Suffrage Movement really grabbed my attention and took it to the next level. I studied the Suffrage Movement in high school but I don't remember it getting into the down and dirty process of how these women earned us the right to vote. Could I have really forgotten the horrific abuse and intimidation that was suffered in the name of voicing our opinion?

This isn't a distant event: It was 1920. My mother was born in 1927, making hers the first generation of girls in America born into that right, making me the second. Here are excerpts from the article:

"On Nov. 15, 1917, 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. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

"The guards chained Suffragist Lucy Burns' 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.

"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. And when the United States President and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized, the doctor patently refused, admonishing the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'"

I won't forget your sacrifices when I proclaim I have ALWAYS had the right to vote.