Why Women Should Vote

This came from an email from my aunt, and is worth the read for any woman. Make sure you vote!

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers, as
they lived only 90 years ago. Remember, it was not until 1920 that women
were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

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.'

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?

HBO released a movie on video and DVD about this Night of Terror. 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.'

Exercise your right to be heard this November!!!