#82
THIS
IS MOVING. HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET, IF WE EVER KNEW.
Remember, it was not until 1920, that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.
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.
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.
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.
WHY
WOMEN SHOULD VOTE
This is the story of our Grandmothers and
Great-grandmothers. They lived only 90 years ago.
The
women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless
for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for
the vote. 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.'
(Lucy
Burns)
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.
(Dora
Lewis)
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.
(Alice
Paul)
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?
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.
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 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 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, 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. Whether you vote
democratic, republican or independent party - remember to
vote.
History is being made.
Palin: wrong woman, wrong message
Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome
with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
By Gloria Steinem
[September 4, 2008]
Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that
even
the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the
Republican
Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female
vice
president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have
picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so
women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the
"white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary
Rodham Clinton,
who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a
boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him
and
opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never
been
about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for
women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are
too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no
way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin
shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive
and
deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that
has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential
candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform
that
opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that
Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be
like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my
legs."
This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on
issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the
job because she has children in need of care, especially if they
wouldn't
say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the
spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero
background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37
years of experience.
Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month
about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that
question
until someone answers for me: What is it exactly th at the VP does every
day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really
focused much on
the war in Iraq."
She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular,
and
she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give
a
$1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's
campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state
income
or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long
that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards,
not
lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration
habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views
on
"God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is
that McCain is
filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin
out
of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between
form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing
ideologues;
the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter
of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have
chosen a
woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about
Iraq;
someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of
Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from rig ht-wing
patriarchs
who determin e his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against
Women Act.
Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every
issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that
creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global
warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of
women's
wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves
"abstinence-only"
programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases
and
abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to
shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state
school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation;
she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500
million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she
supports
drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has
opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly,
only younger.
I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle
Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she
does
it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil
fuels
but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't
just
echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs.
Wade,
she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest,
she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as
a
human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that
it
also protects the right to have a child.
So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James
Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are
merely
waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be
voting for
Palin's husband.
Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains
from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and
most
women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist
majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to
support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to
invite
government into the wombs of women.
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs
than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national
stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the
home
until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on
their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their
children.
This could be huge.