The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote. 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 Burns, 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.
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 lesion 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.
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 work 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?
Please, ladies, register to vote if you haven’t, but VOTE. Whether you vote republican, democrat or independent, please don’t take this right lightly. Teach you young girls this story. Every election is important, every single election. We will probably meet these courageous women one day in heaven and we don’t want to hear: “Didn’t it matter? Didn’t you care”?
Barbara Dean
