The Okcitykid - A Peaceful Vet

From a recent email message from Batch, the leader of of the Oklahoma City Peace House.

The doctor refused to find Alice Paul “insane,” saying,
     “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”

1920 …..
Women were not “granted” the right to vote.
Women WON the right to vote.

Here are pictures & stories of Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers only 90 years ago.

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

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.

(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.

By the end of the night, some 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.’
 
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.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf