Please Rock the Vote! If you haven't registered press the link on the lower left hand side of my webpage.

A Message for all women AND men.

WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers. They 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. They were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House and carrying signs asking for the vote. 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.' (Lucy Burns) They beat Lucy Burns. They chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night She was bleeding and gasping for air. (Dora Lewis) They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell. They 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. 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-- 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. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? We have to get our nails done? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining? What would those women think of the way we use, or don't use,our right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women. It is shocking to know that Woodrow Wilson and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. It is inspiring that the 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. However you vote -vote. History is being made. Take part in it. Be Insane~ Vote in the upcoming election. Vote and excercise the right that these women won in courage.