Secular Woman Article

Remember Women’s Equality Day

By Elsa Roberts, Follow her on Twitter

One woman struggles on a table while five prison guards hold her down and shove a feeding tube up her nose. 

During another prison stay her hands are handcuffed above the door for the night after she was beaten.

Another woman, another feeding tube forced on her, and raw eggs poured down her throat.

These women, described above, endured painful indignities and intermittent imprisonment to help secure the right to vote that women currently enjoy in the U.S. today; their names were Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.

They were part of what is known as the Suffrage movement, which began in the mid 1800s and continued through the Victorian era until women finally secured voting rights after August 18, 1920, after Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th amendment.  

Paul and Burns were preceded in the movement by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and numerous other women, many of whom convened the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 to put forth demands for the rights of women. One of those rights was the right to vote, and so the Suffrage movement got underway. Anthony and many other activists pushed for women’s right to vote through education campaigns, picketing the White House, attempting to vote in elections, and lobbying congress. In 1878, Stanton and Anthony drafted what would become the 19th Amendment. It was presented to the Senate where it spent several years in committee before being voted down in 1887.

It took many more years of action and the civil disobedience of women like Paul and Burns, who organized the National Women’s Party in 1917 to begin to picket the White House in protest of President Wilson’s opposition to suffrage. The women picketing, known a the Silent Sentinels, picketed every day except Sunday until 1919. Wilson eventually bowed to pressure and supported the 19th amendment, and, after a failed attempt in 1918, it passed Congress in 1919.

Now, when women head to the polls or fill out their absentee ballot, they are fulfilling the legacy left by women ready to die for the ability to have their voices heard and participate fully in the political process through voting. Today, on August 26, 2013, Women’s Equality Day, let us remember these women and celebrate our right to participate in the democratic process while remaining vigilant to protect our voting rights, which are again under attack.

Today, as we take note of our progress we must also again take up the mantle of our foremothers and fight to retain our rights, as they are slowly being eroded away via removing protections from the Voting Rights Act, shortening early voting days and times around the country, and burdening erstwhile voters with ID requirements. Celebrate the women who worked to gain the vote by becoming involved in your local elections and state politics, demand expanded early voting days and fight against the ID requirements which disproportionately impact people of color, women, and the elderly. Together we can take back our rights!

 

swadmin Her•Story

Herstory of U.S. Women’s Right to Vote

Second article in Secular Woman’s Women’s History Month Series.

by Toni Van Pelt

Adapted from NY Times story by Judy Pehrson 2001

The struggle for enfranchisement in the United States, a woman’s right to vote, actually began in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, led by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony (Judy Pehrson NY Times 2001). The Declaration of Sentiments adopted at the convention demanded the right to vote, as well as equal rights in education, industry, the professions, political office, marriage, personal freedom, control of property, guardianship of children, making of contracts, the church and in the leadership of all moral and public movements.

The Suffrage Amendment was introduced into Congress a generation later, but it remained on the shelf. By 1912 it had only once been voted on in the Senate in 1887 and never in the House of Representatives. It had not received a favorable report from the committee of either house since 1892, and had not received a report of any kind since 1896. Suffrage had not been debated on either floor since 1887. To add to the bleak outlook for the amendment, incoming President Woodrow Wilson opposed it.

It was into this vacuum that feminist Alice Paul came. Paul, a well educated Quaker from NJ, who had participated in the British Suffrage Movement while studying in England set about bringing the issue of votes for women to the attention of Congress, the President and the country as a whole. After years of trying friendly persuasion, the National Woman’s Party, which she founded, and it’s 50,000 members decided to change tactics and took to the streets. They marched, picketed the White House, held rallies and publicly burned speeches by President Wilson about freedom abroad, protesting that women had no freedom at home. For their trouble they were harassed by onlookers, beaten by the police and arrested and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes.

Through it all Paul and her followers stood fast with the dedication described by one of them who told a judge “So long as you send women to jail for asking for freedom, just so long will there be women willing to go to jail for such a cause.”

Paul also used quieter tactics, such as education. She eventually convinced Wilson to support suffrage and he included it as an issue in his message to Congress in 1918.

Finally, in June 1919 the Senate passed the 19th amendment and Paul and the National Woman’s Party went on the road to assure ratification by the states. After ONE year of strenuous maneuvering, 36 states finally ratified the amendment – Tennessee was the last to ratify on August 18, 1920. The final proclamation granting women the vote was signed August 26, 1920 – ending a four-generation struggle.

Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, three years later. It took 72 years from the time women’s voting rights were envisioned and written down to became a reality. It has been 90 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was envisioned and written down. How much longer will it be before women are written into the U.S. Constitution with complete human rights equal to men?