August is Women's Suffrage Month - 100 Years - The Vote

It’s the Centennial Anniversary month of one of the most important Constitutional Amendments.  All of the amendments are relevant with importance, but I’m rather biased about this one. On August 18, 1920, the 19^th Amendment which gives women the right to vote in this country was ratified.  Two weeks later on August 26, 1920, US Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby formally announced this amendment as being an official part of the Constitution of the United States of America.  While the campaign for women’s suffrage began in the 1820s, the “official” fight was launched in 1848 with the first Women’s Convention in Seneca Falls, NY.  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott were influential suffragists of that time (Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Movement in 1869).  It took 72 years from that convention to win the fight; many of us feel it continues in other ways today.

One hundred years isn’t so long ago.  If we put it into perspective, a large portion of people who read this blog were born, married, and had children in the 20th century.  Many of us had parents or grandparents (or others who factored significantly in our lives) who were born before this right was won.  In the 20^th Century, prior to 1920, some important inventions and events of note: the vacuum cleaner, air conditioning, the electrocardiogram, radar, radio broadcasting, electric washing machines, sonar, the Kodak Brownie camera, the Model T automobile, silent movies and “talkies”, the first operation of the New York Subway system occurred as did the Wright Brothers powering that infamous flight at Kitty Hawk, and then there was the Titanic.  Before women could vote.  Think about it.  While men of color faced obstacles in voting at polling places in the south, the right to vote was guaranteed to them in 1870 with the ratification of the 15^th Amendment. It took another fifty years for women; prior to that females were viewed as property of the central male figure in their life (father, husband, brother, etc).  Married women couldn’t own property, and had no legal claim to money they might earn or have inherited.  Again, think about it.  Property, servant, poor relation, wife, mother. Imagine giving birth to a son knowing he would be entitled to rights you’d never have yourself; worse might be having a daughter and worrying about her fate which would be completely out of your control.

We stand on the shoulders of all the women who came before us, but especially the women who fought and demanded women have the vote.  They suffered tremendously for it.  The first march on Washington, D.C. occurred in 1913 and was by the women’s suffrage movement demanding the right to vote. They stole President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration thunder by marching in front of the White House the day before his big event in an attempt to bring attention to this issue.  Many were arrested and tortured.  They were known as “suffragists” in the US because the suffragettes (their UK counterparts) used vandalism, destruction, and physical acts of violence to get their point across.  The suffragists thought they stood a better chance of succeeding by using peaceful tactics, and the name association might undermine their efforts.  For seven years after that march on Washington, these “Silent Sentinels” as they were known because they only picketed and held signs, were tortured, beaten, arrested, humiliated, incarcerated, force-fed with tubes up their nostrils, (and suffered many other inhumane indignities) simply because they demanded the right to vote.  In 1920, they succeeded, beating their UK counterparts by eight years.

It’s significant to note that some women could vote in certain parts of the US prior to it becoming a right for all women in every state (having equal voting rights as men); it was the same in the UK where certain “conditions” granted it.  The Wyoming Territory was the first to grant its female citizens the right to vote in 1869. Eventually, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, the Alaska Territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington followed suit by 1918.

The first Suffrage Proposal, which would eventually become the 19^th Amendment, was introduced to Congress in 1878, and was rejected; in 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was established.  Some important names to remember who were instrumental in seeing what was initially referred to as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment passed and ratified were Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Carrie Chapman Catt.

Alice Paul

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the National Woman’s Party, and were leaders who organized the two-and-a-half-year-vigil of picketing in front of the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s administration.  They silently protested six days per week, holding signs and marching.  During this time, many of the over 2,000 women who participated were harassed, arrested and unjustly treated by local and national authorities, including the torture and abuse inflicted on them before and during the infamous November 14, 1917 “Night of Terror” at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. Carrie Chapman Catt opposed the protests, believing it hurt the cause.

Lucy Burns

Of all of the women, Lucy Burns was arrested the most.  She eventually retired from the cause after 1920, saying it was time other women step forward and take on the fight. She died in 1966.  Alice Paul would eventually pen the Equal Rights Amendment, introducing it in 1923, and seeing it passed in 1972 while pushing the fight until her death in 1977. However, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was never ratified.  Of note, the 19^th Amendment is the only amendment to the constitution that mentions the word ‘woman’; the only right guaranteed to women is the federal right to vote.

There is so much history and an endless roll call of names instrumental in getting all women the same voting rights as men.  I’m surprised at just how many women in this country do not know their history; equally surprising is the number of women who choose not to exercise their precious right to vote.  History is important.

Finally, I’d like to share the beginning of a play that I’ve been working on that is based on a fictional meeting between Alice Paul and Nellie Bly.  Lucy Burns plays a role in it, as does a fictional character by the name of Adelia Jones.  It opens with an explanation of its title, Silent Sentinels, and with a soliloquy by Lucy Burns. Please keep in mind it is a rough, first draft.  I can only hope that one day it will see the stage.

As always, please remember that copyright applies, and equally as always…thank you for continuing to read my work.

SILENT SENTINELS

By Veronica Randolph Batterson

©Veronica Randolph Batterson 2019

On November 14, 1917, 33 women (after multiple arrests for nearly two years) had once again been arrested and were being held in Virginia’s notorious Occoquan Workhouse. Their “crime” involved silently marching in front of the White House in an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson to give women the right to vote. They marched and they held signs. On that fateful night, they suffered brutal physical abuse at the hands of those who held them incarcerated, under the directive of a judge who had grown tired of sentencing them.  Later known as The Night of Terror, the suffragists were tortured, with one having a heart attack after being physically thrown by a guard.  Lucy Burns spent the entire night handcuffed with her hands above her head.  Because she refused to eat, eventually it would take five guards to hold her down while they force fed her by shoving a tube up her nostril, causing severe nose bleeds. Of all the well-known suffragists, Burns spent the most time in jail.

Eventually, public outrage at how these women were treated would force Wilson to call a special session in May of 1919.  The Susan B. Anthony Amendment was passed in June of 1919, and was ratified in August of 1920.  The 19^th Amendment to the Constitution finally guaranteed women the right to vote due to the bravery of over 2,000 women who, throughout a 2 ½ year vigil, picketed silently and were harassed, arrested and unjustly treated by authorities.  These suffragists were known as the Silent Sentinels.

While it is probable that Nellie Bly and Alice Paul might have known each other, there is no record they ever met, nor any record Bly ever reached out to either Paul or Lucy Burns.  The Bly/Paul encounter is fictional, as is the character of Adelia.

Act One

Scene One

Open.

Setting: a park in Brooklyn, NY. November, 1921

There is a bench, covered with snow. LUCY BURNS appears clutching an open letter. She is distraught and paces before wiping the snow from the bench and sitting down on it. She is alone.

LUCY BURNS

This horrible woman! (she shakes the letter and reads it aloud) ‘I am certain you realize that public interest is great. Why not inform the readers what has happened to the suffragists of yesterday?’ (she stops reading) Yesterday? The gall. Does she not realize that we are still fighting? Fighting the demons of yesterday that no one would understand, including herself, that’s what. Fighting for our sanity and peace. Hoping someone else will take up the fight for tomorrow? Fighting for simply being left alone. (she weeps, then continues looking up) Why is it that I feel such dislike for this woman? Did I not march and endure the unspeakable so that all women, including those such as herself, would have opportunity and see their rights equal to men realized? Try as I might, I cannot shake the feeling of resentment toward her, and those like her. Those who chose to sit at home, knitting or saying ‘yes, dear’ to their husbands who no more thought they deserved the vote than the ones who cuffed me to a jail cell while I bled from my nose. (she stares, and in barely a whisper continues) Even now, after all that, they will more than likely never vote, thinking they do not deserve to, and believing those same men who tell them they cannot. What was the fight for then? (she stands) If they had just taken part, perhaps they would know the sacrifice it took to give them the right they do not exercise. (she stares in a trance as lights dim over her)

Audience hears what LUCY BURNS is remembering: the roll call of each woman incarcerated in Occoquan. As each woman says her name, a spotlight appears behind her, disappearing as the next is called.

Offstage

LUCY BURNS’ VOICE:  Roll Call!

©Veronica Randolph Batterson 2019

  

Overcoming Obstacles

Opening a box and seeing some old art supplies prompted this blog post.  For weeks, I’ve thought about it and worked on it: editing, deleting, rewriting, setting it aside, then coming back to it.  I decided not to share several times, but the need to do so wouldn’t leave.  This volley of back and forth indecision is really explanatory of the whole thing; it is controlling.  So, why not?  They say release is good.

In the fall of 1980, I was a naïve eighteen-year-old college freshman attending the largest university in the state.  At the start of the school year, I was clear-eyed and trusting, excited to be away from home and looking forward to meeting new people; studio art was my focus.  By the end of the year, I felt defeated and demoralized due to the actions of a teaching assistant.  One class.  One graduate student.  Unfortunately, I’ve allowed him and my experience with him define too much of who I am today; I haven’t put paint brush to canvas in thirty-eight years.

This student taught the final art class of the term, and the last art class I ever took.  He charged past that invisible line of appropriateness, and I became the statistic that no woman ever wants to be.  My response: I transferred to another school, changed my major, destroyed most of my art work, and never told anyone.  It’s a lonely club to be in, trying to convince yourself you were a victim while fighting the belief that you’ll never deserve anything better.  Perhaps if there had been camera phones and social media back then, I might have had an easier time of getting through it.  At the very least, the odds of finding a support system to give me a little courage would have been greater.  As it was, isolation was where I retreated, and where this has remained until now.

There are times I can’t remember what I ate for lunch the previous day, yet nearly four decades later I remember everything about that teaching assistant.  His full name, where he was from, what he looked like, the intensity of his eyes, the paint under his finger nails, the color of his hair, how he smelled and what he wore.  Timewise, my experience with him was but a miniscule fragment of my life, yet it has been one of the most controlling and emotional barricades I’ve faced.  And I’ve allowed it.  It was easier to push it to the back of my mind than to face it. 

Years later, the difficulty always surfaced whenever I had to enter an art supply store with my younger daughter.  It wasn’t easy wandering the aisles and picking up things she needed for her classes; the inability to focus, feelings of nausea, and melancholia were real, and they hit hard because of something I had no control over.  Occasionally, I would purchase things for myself with the intention of someday “doing something with it”, but that day has yet to come.  I even enrolled in art courses at the university level and through art leagues several times over the years, convincing myself when I did so that I could overcome it. I cancelled all before ever attending.

When my daughters were younger, I wished for them to be fearless.  This had to do with possessing the inner belief in oneself, of allowing confidence to override insecurity; knowing without a doubt that they had the right to attempt, work for, and earn the same things in life as anyone else.  I don’t think I was the best role model, though; I earned a failing grade with that fearless bit, and I’m pretty sure they picked up on it.  How can I expect things of them, when I don’t exhibit the same for myself? 

A positive movement is happening for women, and this in part has emboldened me.  It makes me hopeful, and anxious.  In becoming stronger, I hope women embrace the past, learn how the paths were blazed, and never forget it.  We weren’t just dropped onto this earth, entitled to the rights we enjoy. There were pioneers who paved the way for us.  Nellie Bly.  Alice Paul.  Lucy Burns.  So many others.  Then there are the rest of us, with our own private obstacles to overcome, complete with history that defines us, hinders us and encourages us.  We might not change the world, but we matter, as do our personal stories.

I’ve followed a different artistic path with my photography, books, and short stories, and I’m proud of these things.  But this other thing lingers, so this morning I did something new:  an art supply search on Amazon.  For myself.  Baby steps.