IRON-JAWED ANGELS

Greetings from this Same-Sex Couple!!

A friend forwarded this, and I thought you also
might find it eye-opening. The message was
inspired by an HBO film that's on this month--
Iron Jawed Angels, with Hilary Swank playing Alice
Paul.

It is the story of our Grandmothers and
our Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90
years ago. It was not until 1920 that women in the
U.S. were granted the right to go to the polls and
vote.

Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on November
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 women were
innocent and defenseless. An d 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."

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 -- all of it 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 w eeks
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?

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 or Republican -- remember to vote.
History is being made.