It was 1917, and Alice Paul and her followers had been
campaigning for months for a women’s right to vote. They stood in
the winter cold, bundled up in heavy coats, silently holding signs
outside the gates of the White House asking,
”
Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?
”
It was 1917, and Alice Paul and her followers had been campaigning for months for a women’s right to vote. They stood in the winter cold, bundled up in heavy coats, silently holding signs outside the gates of the White House asking, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”
When verbal abuse and bottles were hurled at them it didn’t discourage the women. President Woodrow Wilson had to take drastic measures to stop the embarrassment the picketers were causing his administration. He had Alice Paul arrested for “obstructing sidewalk traffic,” and she spent weeks in solitary confinement.
She and her followers were the latest in a long line of women who had fought since the mid-19th century for American women’s rights, especially the right to vote. If women could gain a voice in the political process, then they knew they’d be able to vote to give them the other rights they lacked.
When Alice Paul went on a hunger strike, prison doctors began painfully force-feeding her by putting a tube down her throat three times a day. They put her in a psychiatric ward; tried to make her think she was crazy; medicated her and threatened to commit her to an insane asylum.
She and other activists were kept in appalling conditions, in cells with open toilets that could not be flushed except by a guard outside the cell. According to affidavits filed at the time, the women were subjected to nights of terror when guards would go on rampages, beating, choking and kicking the inmates. Yet, after weeks in prison, Paul’s spirit would not be broken. She refused to give up the fight for the vote.
President Woodrow Wilson finally conceded and announced his support for the women’s vote on Jan. 9, 1918. The very next day, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (to give the right to vote to women) barely passed in the House of Representatives. It passed in the Senate by one vote. In 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. American women had finally won the right to vote.
When I feel like my vote won’t count, I remind myself that the Amendment for women to vote passed in the Senate by one vote. I remember that a mere 537 votes decided the outcome of the last Presidential election.
If we don’t bother to vote on November 2, we are disrespecting the memory of women like Alice Paul whose imprisonment and torture won the right for us to go to the polls. Visit any country where women don’t have the vote and you will see how many other rights they are lacking. When we don’t vote, we throw away our voice. We have the power to change things, but we choose not to use it.
Emancipated slave and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth, at the Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, said, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!”
