Iron Jawed Angels

This is my favorite banner during the Woman's Suffrage Movement!  It is powerful, and it is crazy to think that it took such a long time for women to get the right to vote!

With the election today it made me think about the fight different groups through out American History have had to fight to vote!  Women started the fight in 1848 at Senecca Falls Convention.  And it will take 72 years to get the vote!  It took till the 20th Century for women to get the right to vote, and our country was founded in the 20th century!  What is wrong with that picture?  Here is a description of what these brave women went through so ALL WOMEN could get the right to vote:

The women during Women's Suffrage were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

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 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.

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.

(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 poured

liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for

weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle

these women waged so that women could pull the curtain at the polling

booth and have their say.

'What would those women think of the way women use, or don't use, their right

to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women,

but those of us who did seek to learn.'

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.'

So do your part, and VOTE!  It has taken blood, sweat, and tears to have the right!