Trying to Get Young Women to Vote? Here's a good flyer for you.

Hey all--

I received an e-mail from a friend the other day and wanted to share it with you.

I made a bunch of copies, and carry them around with me, and when I speak to a woman who tells me she doesn't vote, I say, "Here. Read this."

Some of you might remember a post I made several days ago where I mentioned a woman working at a Whataburger that I talked to, and couldn't make her understand how important it was. I never wanted to feel that helpless again.

I went to the Smithsonian the day after our Women's march in DC in April, and upon seeing the sufragette's wagon, pictures, banners and all, promptly began bawling.

This is very moving. I worked a voter registration drive on Saturday, and gave one to a woman who told me she doesn't vote. When I worked my way back up the line to her, she let me register her the second time. Use it!

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Remember How Women Got the Vote

The women were innocent and defenseless. And 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 helpless 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 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--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 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.

There was a time when I knew these women well. I met them in college--not in my required American history courses, which barely mentioned them, but in women's history class. That's where I found the irrepressibly brave Alice Paul. Her large, brooding eyes seemed fixed on my own as she stared out from the page. Remember, she silently beckoned. Remember.

I thought I always would. I registered voters throughout college and law school, worked on congressional and presidential campaigns until I started writing for newspapers. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president, I took my 9-year-old son to meet her. "My knees are shaking," he whispered after shaking her hand. "I'm never going to wash this hand again."

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 even 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 will run the movie periodically before releasing it 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 Bunko 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."


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Spread the news!

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because of rigid day care hours. The polling place is always close to home, not to the workplace. Voting means getting up and hour early or getting home an hour late. When you have whiny kids clinging to you and the day care won't take them early or keep them late, this is a real ordeal. No wonder a lot of working mothers say to hell with it. The government doesn't want them to vote, makes it hard for them to vote, and they respond.

Single women without kids are harder to understand, except that the same barrier of having the polling place inconvenient to the workplace applies, and voting invariably is on a workday. When you have an hour communte to and from work (even on mass transit, a usual thing), that means the hour or so an employer might give you to vote is simply not adequate. Either you're there at 7AM when the polls open, or you rush home from work and hope you are allowed to vote before the polls close at 7PM.

Our system, which used to make sense when we were an agrarian country with weekend market days, is an anachronism which now favors the retired and the leisured, and leaves working people out in the cold.

And that is why women don't vote. And working men.

There is no excuse, and we must show them that, in our words and in our actions.

This is their future. I'll hammer them until they get the message.

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I'm making this into a flier for a voting drive. I love the last line: "Courage in women is often mistaken for instanity".

Good to hear you can use it!

Thanks for spreading the word!
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It was forwarded to me in an e-mail.

I just pasted it into a Word file and prettied it up by bolding the title and changing the font so it looked nicer.

A google search might reveal the original author. I didn't get that part if it was included in the original e-mail.

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I'm not old enough to remember women's voting rights demonstrations, but I am old enough to remember the pictures of other Americans being beaten by cops with batons and mauled by police dogs for daring to insist on THEIR right to vote. I WILL NEVER FORGET THAT!

I love your signature!