An email a friend sent me sparked the idea to post this excerpt from a biography of suffragist Alice Paul for any woman who might consider blowing off voting because it's such a hassle:



" . . .In January 1917, the first group of American citizens to dramatize its political protest by picketing the White House appeared. They were suffrage pickets, known as Silent Sentinels, holding banners with political slogans and demanding the right to vote. Although told by the chief of police that picketing the White House was prohibited, the picketers continued, becoming the first group in the United States to wage a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign. In July 1917, the arrests of picketers began. Eventually, hundreds of women were arrested on charges of "obstructing sidewalk traffic." Many, including Alice Paul, were convicted and sentenced to prison at the Occoquan Workhouse (now the Lorton Correctional Complex) in Virginia or the District of Columbia Jail.



The conditions in which the suffragists were held at the Occoquan Workhouse were appalling. Blankets were washed once a year. There were open toilets, which could only be flushed from outside the cell by the guard, who might or might not come when called. Women who were on a hunger strike were force-fed. Doris Stevens, one of the prisoners, wrote in the Suffragist of August 11, 1917:



No woman there will ever forget the shock and the hot resentment that rushed over her when she was told to undress before the entire company. . .We silenced our impulse to resist this indignity, which grew more poignant as each woman nakedly walked across the great vacant space to the doorless shower . . .



In a complaint filed by Lucy Burns concerning conditions at the Workhouse, Ms. Burns stated:



The water they [the suffragists] drink is kept in an open pail, from which it is ladled into a drinking cup. The prisoners frequently dip the drinking cup directly into the pail. The same piece of soap is used for every prisoner. As the prisoners in Occoquan are sometimes afflicted with disease, this practice is appallingly negligent.



Virginia Bovee, who had been an officer at the Workhouse, stated in an affidavit given after her discharge:



The beans, hominy, rice, corn meal . . . and cereal have all had worms in them. Sometimes the worms float on top of the soup. Often they are found in the corn bread.



November 15, 1917, was the Night of Terror at Occoquan:



Under orders from W. H. Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.



In all, Miss Paul served three prison terms in the US. During her imprisonment in the District of Columbia Jail in October 1917, weakened by her hunger strike, she was taken by stretcher to the prison hospital. There she was held incommunicado: no attorney, no member of her family, no friend was allowed to see her. Prison officials threatened her with transfer to the jail's psychopathic ward and St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the Government's institution for the insane, if she did not break her hunger strike. When she refused, she was taken by stretcher to a cell in the prison's psychopathic ward and treated like a mental patient. At night, she could not sleep for more than a few minutes at a time because an electric light was aimed at her face once every hour all through the night. She lived in dread of being transferred to St. Elizabeth's. After a week in the ward, through the intercession of a supporter, Dudley Field Malone, the well-known lawyer and liberal, she was returned to the jail's hospital. A week later she was released. Undaunted, she fought on.



In May and June 1919, Congress passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Now it was necessary to secure ratification by the legislatures of thirty-six states (three-quarters of the-then forty-eight). Some believed that this would take twenty years, but they did not reckon with Alice Paul. With her leadership of campaigns throughout the country, the thirty-sixth state ratified in August 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution of the United States, and in 1920 the women of the United States voted in a presidential election for the first time. It had taken seventy-two years beginning with the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 -- spanning two centuries, eighteen presidencies, and three wars -- for American women to get the right to vote." . . . .



Copyright 1998 by Sonia Pressman Fuentes



Remind me again what's so important that we can't take ten minutes to go to the polls?