Volume 11 , Issue 48

Women In History: Suffragettes

Joel sent us the following story concerning the 80th Aniversary of the Persons Case in Canada."

This is the story of women who were ground-breakers. These brave women from the early 1900s made all the difference in the ives we live today. 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 when in North America, women picketed in front of the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote, they were jailed. And by the end of the first night in jail, those women 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 barbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, picking, twisting and kicking the women.

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.

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 pouted liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the pres.

All women who have ever voted, have ever owned property, have ever enjoyed equal rights need to remember that women's rights had to be fought for in Canada as well. Do our daughters and our sisters know the price that was paid to earn rights for women here, in North America?

2009 is the 80th Anniversary of the persons Case in Canada, which finally declared women in Canada to be Persons! Women ? Remember to celebrate the rights we enjoy! "Knowledge is Freedom: hide it, and it withers; share it, and it blooms." -- quote by P. Hill.
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