"Night of Terror"

Parts of this article were first published as “Three United States Feminists--A Personal Tribute,” Jewish Affairs 53.1 (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1998): 37. Further credit goes to Sonia Pressman Fuentes of Moondance.

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 helpless women wrongly convicted of “obstructing sidewalk traffic.” 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. 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 and held in a prison for the insane until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because--why, exactly? We have car pool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?

The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August of 1920 and that year women of the United States voted in a presidential election for the first time. It had taken seventy-two years, beginning with the first Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 -- spanning two centuries, eighteen presidencies, and three wars -- for American women to get the right to vote.

Frankly, voting may often feel more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes, it is even inconvenient. Ask Alice Paul or Lucy Burns or Dora Lewis what’s inconvenient. Ask your grandmother.

See you at the polls.
Think this is ancient history?
Alice Paul lived until 1977.

For more information about Dr. Alice Paul and other leaders in the Suffragist Movement, see www.moondance.org