and how to make your vote count!

This is an e mail which has been circulating and hits the nail right on the head!

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-Grandmothers.  They lived only 90 years ago.  It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote in America.  The women were innocent and defenceless, 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.'  They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above hear 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 November 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 coloured 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 the word was smuggled to the press.

So, refresh my memory.  Some women won't vote this year because - why exactly?  We have carpool duties?  We have to drive the kids?  We have to get to work?  Our vote doesn't matter?  It's raining? 

HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels', now on DVD, is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could walk up to the polling booth and have my say in writing.  What would our foremothers think of the way we use or don't use our right to vote?  Some of us take it for granted now, not just younger women. 

Woodrow Wilson tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized.  The doctor refused.  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." 

In Canada, Nellie McClung was one of the most important leaders of Canada's first wave of feminism and she is still remembered for her role in the famous "Person's Case" which saw Canadian women declared persons in 1929. 

She spearheaded the campaign for women's right to vote in many parts of the country.  When Manitoba's premier Rodmond Roblin suggested 'nice' women did not want the vote, Nellie McClung retorted: "By nice women... you probably mean selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged, overworked women than a pussycat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street.  Now in that sense I am not a nice woman for I do care."  In 1914 she and her fellow reformers put on a play called "The Women's Parliament," a satire which turned the tables and poked fun at the dangers of giving men the right to vote.  Her parody caused uproarious laughter for packed and enthusiastic audiences.  In 1916 the government gave Manitoba women the right to vote.  So did Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C.  Other provinces soon followed, though Asian and First Nations women were denied the right until after World War II. 

If you think your vote won't count Google how to vote strategically in your particular riding.  Or cast a protest vote by leaving your ballot blank!  Election is Tuesday October 14th.

Not only is voting our right, it is women's obligation.

Respond to my blog.  E mail skyes@1023bob.com