Girlfriends, can we talk? Oh, yeah -- you men can listen in if you like. But right now, I really want to talk to those women who are wondering why voting might not matter very much this year.
Ninety years ago, American women finally won the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment. We see this right as a given now, but, as Kaili Joy Gray reminded us yesterday, we take for granted this right, and all the rights that flow from it, at our peril.
Please note: this is my opinion only. Nobody pays me so much as a penny for blogging. I volunteer for no-one right now, and for health reasons, won't be later this fall.
What is at stake? Besides reproductive freedoms, there's a hell of a lot that's worth the effort of voting. Continuing economic reform. Funds to keep our communities and schools functional during the worst economy in seventy years. A green energy future. Social justice for the poor, for undocumented immigrants, for gay and lesbian couples. An end to DADT. The ongoing fight to get real healthcare reform. A revamped infrastructure. These may not look like "women's issues", but they touch every woman's life, and the lives of our families. They, and many other issues, will make all our lives better. And the women's vote is key to advancing the progressive agenda. Now, just as much as then, the predominantly male political leadership too often takes it into their heads to say they restrict progressive ideas for our own good, for our families' good, that we don't really know what we need. Sometimes they even imply we are crazy.
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This afternoon I found an email from my sister in my inbox, forwarded from her principal. It had been sent to an entire school faculty on Friday. The principal had forwarded it from yet another, anonymous source. It was, in essence, a testimonial to the women's suffrage movement, inspired by HBO's movie Iron Jawed Angels. As the original email's author wrote:
We are celebrating the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. It seems particularly important to remember that we have only had the right to vote since 1920 because this year some conservatives are saying they want to go back to the Constitution as originally written! (emphasis added)
She went on to write:
Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote....
The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.
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.
It's true. It's our history. The prison's leadership wanted a doctor to certify Alice Paul as insane so they could institutionalize her for life. The doctor, to his credit, refused:
...the examining psychiatrist pronounced her sane, describing her as willing to die for her cause and never giving up.
Bravery was not, is not the same as insanity. Having courage doesn't mean being crazy. It's an old, old slander, and and it gets recycled endlessly because it works. As progressives and liberals -- the left-leaning in the Democratic party -- it behooves us to remember that truth. And if we forget the history of the women's suffrage movement, we could very well lose our political clout. We're not crazy. We're not hysterical. We're not "fucking stupid", to quote someone who's supposed to be on our side. We simply want to build on what our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers won for us under tremendous pressure and with great suffering. We're only crazy if we throw it away by default. We're only insane if we don't vote, even if the choices are between the unpalatable and the incomprehensible.
This is what I wrote back to my sister:
...The right to vote vouchsafes our ability to control our own bodies and reproduction. It gives us the power to vote in the best interests of our children and families. It is the very basis of our citizenship and legal personhood. Before 1920, we lived under the legal doctrine of the femme couverte, which relegated women to the status of legal chattel of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons from the cradle to the grave.
...I would be willing to bet that a great many working mothers actually hold down two jobs just to make ends meet, and have long commutes on top of that. In the face of that economic necessity, a lot of women haven't the time to read about and be awakened to the erosion of women's rights. They don't know how much they've lost until they need, say, an emergency abortion in the 4th month -- and are unlucky enough to live somewhere like Louisiana or Oklahoma.
The "she's insane" line is the oldest weapon in the patriarchal strategy book.
If the Republicans win big in November, we're going to hear a lot more about "crazy liberals" and "insane progressive Democrats" -- that's practically guaranteed. Remember whose interests they serve. It is to their benefit to paint us as insane, because no one with sense listens to crazy people. The charge is a weapon, and it's been a useful weapon for generations.
Now what this means for us -- progressive and liberal women in particular, and all of us more generally: we are going to have to hold our noses, swallow some rancor and vote back into office as many Democrats on the ballot as we possibly can this November. I include myself, and trust me, that much bile isn't going to set well in my stomach. I'm represented by a first-term Blue Dog, and I am deeply disappointed in his work this term. But the Republican running against him is so far to the right that Darrell Issa and John Boehner are probably anticipating his election with glee. I want to deny them that joy.
All over this country, in legislatures in many states, women's reproductive rights are being eroded. In the US Congress, policies that help women and their families -- extended unemployment, state aid for education, the public option in healthcare reform, and so many more -- have been targeted and diminished or defeated by the Republican minority. They want to take us back to the 18th century, people. What does that mean for women, for our families, for our towns and cities? It means we lose rights they don't think we ought to have. Public institutions and services we think of as being essentials of civilized life will be eroded to the point that they become subject to fee-for-service. And they'll paint us as crazy, as insane, as we fight for our personal rights, our families' well-being, and our communities' economic and social health.
Women living now have the vote and use it for what they see as the common good because of what these women did three, four generations ago. Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Dora Lewis, and many more essentially endured abuse and torture to gain a right too many of us take for granted, are too willing to discount because we so seldom get the representation we really want. And I won't kid you -- we still may not get the representation we really want this time either. The political climate right now is poisonous. But the reality is, it can, and will, get worse if the Republicans win big this fall. We will get political "leadership" we will all loathe with a passion if we sit home November 2.
Vote as if everything depended on it. Because it does.