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The Privilege of Voting
Dear Editor,
I am reading the book the Manchester District Library chose for the September book discussion and it is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in N.Y.C. in 1911. (David Von Drehle, “Triangle: the Fire that Changed America”.)
The Triangle fire was not the first time girls had been burned alive in New York City. Every year thousands were maimed. The life of men and women was so cheap. There were so many to take their place.
Reforms for workers came about only because the men in power realized they needed the influence/votes of the immigrants and women. The largest percentage of these immigrants worked in the garment shops, or had loved ones that did, and a large percentage of them were young women.
Politicians were very cautious. Their financial backers were the factory owners. But it was the picketing shop workers, the union leaders, the socialist writers and lecturers, the progressive millionaires (mainly women), college students and settlement house workers that encouraged mass meetings and strikes that influenced the one place that the politicians cared about most, and that was the ballot box!
As I am volunteering at the Michigan Democratic Headquarters I realize that the issue the person on the phone cares about most.... for the seniors its health care and Medicare; for many it’s the economy, social security, education; for everyone...the war, terrorism and homeland security.... this voter will chose the candidate that will help them most. And they “will” vote I am told. You bet!!
Pick an issue and then you just have to vote.
I just had this short history lesson about the privilege of voting forwarded to me and I thought it was a good reminder. People are dying and suffering today for the right to vote.
A short history lesson on the privilege of voting...
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 women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic."
They beat Lucy Burn, 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. 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 inconvenient. 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." We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women.
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