Women and Voting- I hope we have evolved...but I think not.

I got an email from a friend the other day and thinking back to a conversation with my daughter about voting when she turned eighteen; getting the answer "I live in Utah, my vote won't count." brought an entire new meaning to the words below.  No matter where you live, how the votes typically swing (for or against your views) you have the right to express your beliefs.  If we all took the opportunity and TIME to vote, perhaps more of the public voice would be heard in politics, not at Tea Parties.

 Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.HBO has recently put out a movie about 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. The womens only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.
 The women depicted in this movie 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.'

(Lucy Burns) 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.  

 (Dora Lewis) They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, 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.

 (Alice Paul)
 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?  We don't have a car to drive three blocks???
 
 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.'  (Sound familiar to anyone out there???!!!)

I had a great discussion about voting, clear cutting, politics, (picking out the right dog-lol) and many, many things with my husband and a good friend this weekend.  It is so good to feel that vibrant sense of self worth that a person has who knows their rights and abilities when it comes to voting in an elected authority, helping to pass a law or city ordinance or just volunteering on a committee that helps to better a community.   I know that I am proud of the people that worked hard to earn what rights I have and I hope that I can keep those rights available for future generations.