Lest we forget, on the “Night of Terror” on Nov. 15, 1917 (a mere 87 years ago,) 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 women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs, with 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.
For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food, 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? The “iron jawed angels” waged this battle so that we could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have our voices heard. Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized, but the brave 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.”
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. On Aug. 26, we celebrate the 84th anniversary of a women’s right to vote, passage of the 19th Amendment.
Edythe L. Bronston
Sherman Oaks