October is Women’s History Month

Dear friends,

October is Women’s History Month, and I want to take this opportunity to share with you this story about the struggle of our American sisters for the right to vote:

This is the story of women who were ground-breakers. These brave women from the early 1900s made all the difference in the lives we live today. 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 when, in North America, women picketed in front of the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote, they were jailed.

And by the end of the first night in jail, those women 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 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.

All women who have every voted, have ever owned property, have ever enjoyed equal rights need to remember that women’s rights had to be fought for in Canada as well.  Do our daughters and our sisters know the price that was paid to earn rights for women here, in North America?   

2009 is the 80th Anniversary of the Persons Case in Canada, which finally declared women in Canada to be Persons.