This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.

Something to remember and teach our children and grandchildren...... especially the girls.

I am guilty of not voting b/c I m frustrated with the system, didnt like the choices etc.  I forget that many sacrificed and bravely insisted upon this right. ( Of course it was men who had to decide it for us.) But thank God for those who were wise enough to see that we have a voice.  It is a privelege to have the right to vote in the US, esp when so many countries have no rights at all.
this is from my friend Linda:

History we need to remember. Nothing we have to do is so important that we cannot take time to vote and to voice our opinions about the men and women who represent us at every level of government local, state or national.

This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who 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.'

(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 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.
 

(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.

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.'


Conferring over ratification [of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution] at [National Woman's Party] headquarters, Jackson Pl [ace] [ Washington , D.C. ]. L-R Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, Anita Pollitzer, Alice Paul, Florence Boeckel, Mabel Vernon (standing, right))

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?



(Mrs. Pauline Adams in the prison garb she wore while serving a sixty-day sentence.)
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

 

 
(Miss Edith Ainge, of Jamestown , New York )

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

(Berthe Arnold, CSU graduate)
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history,saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use, my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

 
 

(Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk , Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner, 'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.')

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.
History is being made.

Timeline For Key Events in women's suffrage

From About.com womens history site
I personally thought this was very interesting and it spurred me on to committ to voting again. ( I quit when Gore got ripped off against ol Dubya bush, I was so angry with our congress and our lack of real voting rights) I think it is sad a young woman has to take women's history classes in college to get any sort of info on these heroines.

Since so many women worked long and tirelessly for us to have the right to have a voice, I am now chagrined that I take things for granted. Those sisters in suffering truly paid dire consequences and endured jeering, slander, harrassment to fight for their sisters in the US to be heard. Of course many were upper middle class or higher status, and did have a sense of duty as well as the confidence to take this on. I suppose poor women with kids participated, but I am of the mind that they were stuck with kids and surviving.


Key events in the struggle for women's suffrage in America.

1837: Young teacher Susan B. Anthony asked for equal pay for women teachers.

July 14, 1848: call to a woman's rights convention appeared in a Seneca County, New York, newspaper.

July 19-20, 1848: Woman's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York.

October, 1850: first National Woman's Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts.

1851: Sojourner Truth defends woman's rights and "Negroes' rights" at a women's convention in Akron, Ohio.

1855: Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell married in a ceremony renouncing the legal authority of a husband over a wife, and Stone kept her last name.

January 8, 1868: first issue of The Revolution appeared.

1868: New England Woman Suffrage Association founded to focus on woman suffrage; dissolves in a split in just another year.

1869: National Woman Suffrage Association founded primarily by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

November 1869: American Woman Suffrage Association founded in Cleveland, created primarily by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Julia Ward Howe.

December 10, 1869: Wyoming territory passed a law permitting women to vote.

1872: Republican Party platform included a reference to woman suffrage.

1872: Campaign was initiated by Susan B. Anthony to encourage women to register to vote and then vote, using the Fourteenth Amendment as justification.

November 5, 1872: Susan B. Anthony and others attempted to vote; some, including Anthony, are arrested.

June 1873: Susan B. Anthony was tried for "illegally" voting.

January 10, 1878: The "Anthony Amendment" to extend the vote to women was introduced into the United States Congress.

1878: First Senate committee hearing on the Anthony Amendment.

1880: Lucretia Mott died.

1887: Three volumes of a history of the woman suffrage effort were published, written primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Mathilda Jocelyn Gage.

1890: American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman Suffrage Association merge into the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

1893: Colorado passed a referendum giving women the vote.

1893: Lucy Stone died.

January 25, 1887: The United States Senate voted on woman suffrage for the first time -- and also for the last time in 25 years.

1896: Utah and Idaho passed woman suffrage laws.

1900: Carrie Chapman Catt became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

1902: Elizabeth Cady Stanton died.

1904: Anna Howard Shaw became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

1906: Susan B. Anthony died.

1910: Washington State established woman suffrage.

May 4, 1912: Women marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City, demanding the vote.

May 4, 1913: About 5,000 paraded for woman suffrage up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

1913: Women in Illinois were given the vote in most elections -- the first state East of the Mississippi to pass a woman suffrage law.

1913: Alice Paul formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, first within the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

1914: The Congressional Union split from the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

1915: Carrie Chapman Catt elected to presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

1916: The Congressional Union recreated itself as the National Woman's Party.

1917: National American Woman Suffrage Association officers meet with President Wilson. (photo)

1917: National Woman's Party began picketing the White House.

June 1917: Arrests began of pickets at the White House.

1917: Montana elected Jeannette Rankin to the United States Congress.

March 1918: A court declared invalid the White House suffrage protest arrests.

January 10, 1918: House of Representatives passed the Anthony Amendment but the Senate failed to pass it.

May 21, 1919: United States House of Representatives passed the Anthony Amendment again.

June 4, 1919: United States Senate approved the Anthony Amendment.

August 18, 1920: Tennessee legislature ratified the Anthony Amendment by a single vote, giving the Amendment the necessary states for ratification.

August 24, 1920: Tennessee governor signed the Anthony Amendment.

August 26, 1920: United States Secretary of State signed the Anthony Amendment into law.

1923: Equal Rights Amendment introduced into the United States Congress.