11/05/2024
Social media: an amazing platform for storytelling, a treacherous medium for politics.
I'm not going to admonish you to vote a certain way. But I do want to tell you a story about the slabs of concrete outside
the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, a few blocks from my house.
The concrete was taken from the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Va., where women demanding the vote were imprisoned in the early part of the 20th century.
By then American women had been pushing for the right to vote for at least 50 years. It would take multiple generations of women pushing for suffrage for them to attain that right.
Consider the "Silent Sentinels," a group of women who, after meeting with President Wilson asking for the right to vote, began quietly protesting outside the White House in January 1917.
For almost three years, the women - some 2,000 strong - were a constant reminder to President Wilson of his failure to support women's suffrage.
Many endured verbal and physical harassment as they stood outside the White House fence in all weathers. And, roughly 500 were arrested over the course of those years, and about 170 were imprisoned at the Workhouse, south of DC.
Conditions in the prison were filthy and dangerous, with worm-infested food served to prisoners and a single bar or soap shared among them.
Not only that, but some of the women who protested via hunger strikes were force-fed by the *prison docto*r, who jammed rubber tubes down their throats and pumped raw eggs through the tubes.
When others Sentinels of Liberty (as they were also known) vociferously protested this abuse, they, too, were arrested and thrown into the Workhouse.
These horrors culminated on the night of November 14, 1917, when the workhouse superintendent ordered guards to choke, kick, beat and chain up the women.
The news media covered these atrocities, forcing President Wilson's hand.
On January 9, 1918, he announced he would support a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, but a bill to formalize it got bogged down in Congress, and the arrest and mistreatment of suffragists continued.
By December 1918, the Silent Sentinels were setting fires outside the White House, in which they would burn Wilson in effigy, or burn pages containing his empty promises.
Despite all they endured, the suffragists did not relent.
By June 1919, the 19th amendment had passed both chambers of Congress. And on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified.
Those concrete slabs on Constitution Avenue? They are jagged, broken, chipped. Even concrete could not withstand the determination of a fleet of American women who asked - then demanded - that their voices be heard, and their votes be counted.
In the name of those who gave their blood, sweat, time and tears for women's suffrage, please remember whose shoulders we stand on.
Please vote.
