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. I 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 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 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. | 
