| Every November all Bodacious Women in the United | | | | Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, |
| States get to vote - for our next President, | | | | dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting |
| members of Congress, and other elected positions. | | | | and kicking the women. Thus unfolded the 'Night of |
| Personally, I'm less interested in WHOM you vote for, | | | | Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the |
| as much as that you vote AT ALL. This is especially | | | | Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards |
| true after reading the following by Jane Saks, | | | | to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there |
| Director of Advancement at the College of | | | | because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's |
| Architecture and the Arts in Chicago. I honestly had | | | | White House for the right to vote.For weeks, the |
| no idea how much our foremothers went through so | | | | women's only water came from an open pail. Their |
| that women in the U.S. had the right to vote.At one | | | | food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. |
| point Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to | | | | When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a |
| persuade a psychiatrist to declare activist Alice Paul | | | | hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube |
| insane so that she could be permanently | | | | down her throat and poured liquid into her until she |
| institutionalized. The doctor refused. He said Alice Paul | | | | vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until |
| was strong and brave. That didn't make her crazy. | | | | word was smuggled out to the press. So, refresh my |
| The doctor admonished the men: "Courage in women | | | | memory. Some women won't vote this year |
| is often mistaken for insanity."I say the only thing | | | | because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We |
| that would qualify us as insane is if we DIDN'T | | | | have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's |
| VOTE!Now, from Jane Saks:"The women were | | | | raining?Last week, I went to a sparsely attended |
| innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the | | | | screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It |
| night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards | | | | is a graphic depiction of the battle these women |
| wielding clubs and with their warden's blessing, went | | | | waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling |
| on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly | | | | booth and have my say.My friend Wendy saw the |
| convicted of obstructing sidewalk traffic. They beat | | | | HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to |
| Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above | | | | talk about it, she looked angry. 'One thought kept |
| her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding | | | | coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she |
| and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a | | | | said. 'What would those women think of the way I |
| dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and | | | | use--or don't use--my right to vote? The right to |
| knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, | | | | vote, she said, had become valuable to her all over |
| thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. | | | | again. |