tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60084483128985360372023-11-15T05:21:14.326-08:00Inspirational WomenInspirational women are everywhere. This blog attempts to recognize some of them - from those who made history, those who were forgotten by history, and those who live down the street.Juliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12842700254661681487noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6008448312898536037.post-19462887121511880802008-09-18T05:24:00.000-07:002008-09-18T05:26:21.431-07:00Inspiring Quotes from Women<b>Emily Dickinson, Poet</b><br />Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.<br /><br /><b>Diane Ackerman, Poet</b><br />[quoted in Newsweek, September 22, 1986] I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.<br /><br /> <b>Carrie Chapman Catt, Women's Rights Activist</b><br />[in a speech at the Senate] No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.<br /><b><br />Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist,</b><i> Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women</i><br />Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.Juliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12842700254661681487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6008448312898536037.post-42705757505355607642008-09-16T10:00:00.000-07:002008-09-16T10:19:09.671-07:00Why we can vote<div> <div><b><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 12pt;"></span></span></b><b><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 13.5pt;"></span></span></b>Many people forget how recent it was that women were given the right to vote. August 26, 1920 marked the end of a long battle with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote in the United States.<br /><br />(Note, this was a full 50 years after the <b>Fifteenth Amendment</b>, which prohibits each government in the United States from preventing a citizen from voting based on that citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude (i.e. slavery), was ratified on February 3, 1870.<br /><br />This is the story of the<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"> Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">, </span></span><br /><br /><img src="http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ecc1ee1542&realattid=0.1&attid=0.5&disp=emb&view=att&th=11c54dc8a6cbfaef" height="448" width="600" /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"></span></span><br /></div></div><div><div>Women picketed the White House for the right to vote.<br /><img src="http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ecc1ee1542&realattid=0.2&attid=0.3&disp=emb&view=att&th=11c54dc8a6cbfaef" height="420" width="600" /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed </span><br /><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking </span><br /><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">for the vote. </span></span><br /><img src="http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ecc1ee1542&realattid=0.3&attid=0.2&disp=emb&view=att&th=11c54dc8a6cbfaef" height="600" width="435" /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of<br />'obstructing sidewalk traffic.' </span></span><br /><b><span style="font-size:130%;color:navy;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 13.5pt; color: navy;"><br /></span></span></b><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">(Lucy Burns)</span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">for air. </span></span><br /><img src="http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ecc1ee1542&realattid=0.4&attid=0.4&disp=emb&view=att&th=11c54dc8a6cbfaef" height="600" width="452" /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">(Dora Lewis)</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.<br /><br />Thus unfolded the</span></span><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"> 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917</span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">, </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">to vote.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. </span></span><br /><img src="http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ecc1ee1542&realattid=0.5&attid=0.1&disp=emb&view=att&th=11c54dc8a6cbfaef" height="600" width="396" /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">(Alice Paul)</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">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 </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">until word was smuggled out to the press. </span></span><br /><a title="http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf" href="http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/<wbr>collections/suffrage/nwp/<wbr>prisoners.pdf</span></span></a><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:navy;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt; color: navy;"> </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because-</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">-why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?<br /><br />Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.<br /><br />All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Sometimes it was inconvenient.<br /><br />My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">'What would those women think of the way I use , or don't use,</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'<br /><br />HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">social studies and government teachers would include the movie in </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">a little shock therapy is in order.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'<br /><br />We need to get out and vote and use th</span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">is right that was fought so </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.<br /><br /></span></span></div> </div>Juliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12842700254661681487noreply@blogger.com0