What if you couldn’t vote on November 5th? I don’t mean what if you chose not to vote because you’re tired of the way that your politicians are representing you in your State’s capitol or in Washington, D.C. I mean – what if you couldn’t vote because the society that you were born in to didn’t give you that right? What if you were born in to a country that didn’t let you vote because you had brown hair or blue eyes or were female? How hard would you fight for that right? Would you be beaten for that right? Arrested? Imprisoned? Starve yourself? That’s the country that Alice Paul was born in to when she was born in New Jersey in 1885. The women’s suffragist movement began in the 1800’s and in 1878 the right to vote amendment was first introduced in Congress. Alice began attending suffragist meetings with her mother as a young girl. She attended college and received several degrees. It was while studying in the U.K. that her passion for women’s rights grew. When she returned to the U.S., she grew frustrated at the conservative suffragists and decided to pressure the President directly. President Woodrow Wilson had been avoiding the suffragists’ issue and had been quoted as saying that women must “supplement a man’s life”. They picketed the White House regularly until 1917 when the U.S. entered WWI. Many viewed their protests as unpatriotic and President Wilson authorized that they be arrested for obstructing traffic. They were imprisoned, denied legal counsel, beaten, shared their cells with rats, and risked being detained indefinitely as mental patients. It was then that Alice Paul began a hunger strike which would put her in one of these sanitariums in hopes that she would be declared insane. Mounting pressure regarding the way these women were being treated prompted President Wilson to pardon the women and by early 1918 made a special address that called for support of the suffragists as a war measure – not as a right of all Americans. On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Alice realized that earning the right to vote was only a beginning and proposed what she thought was the next step in women’s rights by writing the still-to-be-enacted Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. In 1972, The Equal Rights Amendment Passed the House and Senate, but couldn’t get the needed 38 votes from the States to become law. The deadline was extended until 1982 where the amendment fell short of ratification by three states. Since 1982, the ERA has come before every session of Congress and current efforts are underway to ratify the amendment. You can read more at equalrightsamendment.org. Alice died in 1977 at the age of 92. I can only imagine how proud she felt every time she cast a ballot. I am embarrassed that I was never aware of Alice’s life and the significance of it on history and on my life. I’m equally embarrassed that I was unaware that it took the commitment of generations of men and women to make this change possible for all of us today. In keeping the memory of Alice alive and all that she gave more than ½ of our population, I ask you - would you fight as hard as she did for the equal rights of women? Are you going to become an active participant in getting the ERA passed? Are you going to vote on November 5th? You can read more about Alices life and campaign by clicking the link below.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:01:28 +0000
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