Remember

The 33 women were barely alive. They had been grabbed, dragged, beaten choked, and pinched. Their food came in open pails, slop,full of worms. When they went on a hunger strike, they were tied to chairs and feeding tubes were forced down their throats. They and their leader, Alice Paul, had been imprisoned for daring to picket the White House of Woodrow Wilson for the right to vote. When Wilson and his cronies tried to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Paul insane, so that she could be permanently institutionalized, he refused, saying that Paul was strong and brave, and that didn't make her crazy. He said, "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity." Today is the 84th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote on August 26, 1920.------I think it almost unbelievable that women have not always had that right. It makes my blood boil to think that my grandmother was "allowed" to work from daylight to dusk, cleaning, cooking, and washing, for her father and 13 siblings---when she was not "pulling cotton" in the fields. And there are women today "who do not have time to vote." Shame on them! The above story was printed in the Rockford, IL city newspaper and is copyrighted.