Someone sent this to me so I dont' know who wrote it.
This is the story of women who were ground-breakers. These brave women from the early
1900s made all the difference in the lives 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 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 rightto 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.
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 ?
2010 is the 81st
Anniversary of the Persons Case in Canada
which finally declared women in Canada to
be Persons!