Yesterday I had a chance to see the movie Iron Jawed Angels at a Women’s Rights Movie Night put together by my daughter’s Girl Scout Troop leader. What an eye-opener. It tells the story of the end battle for women’s suffrage and the sacrifice of leaders such as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns for the cause they believed in. I was somewhat familiar with the story of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton from the wonderful PBS documentary Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Stanton & Anthony, and from a visit to the Women's Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls. But I was unaware of the brutal treatment Paul and Burns and many other women survived at the hands of the government after being arrested for silently picketing Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Jailed on a trumped-up charge of “obstructing traffic,” they endured brutal conditions, and when Paul started a hunger strike to protest the treatment, she was kept in solitary and force-fed, with no contact with the outside world. Eventually the word got out and the government was pressured to release them.
It’s hard to imagine not being able to vote. A right we sometimes take so casually has only been officially acknowledged in this country for less than 100 years. And it took over 70 years of fighting to get to that place. Many suffragists never lived to see the fruits of their labor.
So today I say thank you to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and countless others who toiled, some in the spotlight, some in obscurity, so that I and my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter’s daughters can claim our full rights as citizens. For the curious, there’s a wealth of good information at the Library of Congress site, including Tactics and Techniques of the women’s suffrage campaign, a brief timeline of events leading up to the final suffrage vote in 1920, and lots of historic photos. Happy Election Day.
