We need a Suffrage thread so I started this one with the description of an infamous Event in Woman's Suffrage History.
My Mom received this E-mail urging Woman to vote and since the event it describes happened in the Gilded Age I thought to post it here.
Quoted from E-Mail
That's the research I was able to gather about this incident plus the E-mail that is circulating even now. HBO has made a movie about these true and infamous events. There were pictures with the E-mail of the Women in front of the White House with signs asking Wilson why he hated Women and another sign asking him to give Women the Vote plus pictures of the Women in the E-mail mentioned above. I started this Thread in tribute to the Suffragists and their battle for equality and the Right to Vote.
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My Mom received this E-mail urging Woman to vote and since the event it describes happened in the Gilded Age I thought to post it here.
Quoted from E-Mail
"Why Women Should Vote"
This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago. (Mothers too for some of you...)
'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, Brutal Treatment of Women Suffragists at Occoquan Workhouse
The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.
Under orders from W. H. Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.
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 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 cell mate, 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. 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'
That's the research I was able to gather about this incident plus the E-mail that is circulating even now. HBO has made a movie about these true and infamous events. There were pictures with the E-mail of the Women in front of the White House with signs asking Wilson why he hated Women and another sign asking him to give Women the Vote plus pictures of the Women in the E-mail mentioned above. I started this Thread in tribute to the Suffragists and their battle for equality and the Right to Vote.
Brutal Treatment of Women Suffragists at Occoquan Workhouse
The story of the treatment at Occoquan Workhouse in 1917 of the woman suffrage militants arrested for protesting outside the White House.