When I graduated from college I couldn’t find much out there
in the job market. Congratulations! You have a non-teaching degree in English!
Welcome to the part of life where you can speak clearly, write effectively,
think strategically and none of those skills will be celebrated! Now, start
paying those loans! Meh, whatever. I can sincerely tell you that I harbor zero
regrets about earning my stripes from the ground up because those acts set me
on a trajectory to be where I am now which is happy, fulfilled and eagerly
still learning.
I come from a humble background: my first job was picking
blueberries on a small farm in Blandford, Massachusetts. From there I progressed
on an incredibly liner path of babysitting, house cleaning, waitressing, bar
tending, being a secretary and then SLOWLY moving into management positions.
The ironic part of my career history is that beyond the house cleaning, which
taught me small business skills that would later help me as a freelance
marketer, it was truly the volunteer roles I engaged in that developed my
career skill set. Ok, back to my original point: I took my first job in an
administrative role at Mt. Holyoke College (not
coincidentally, one of the oldest female colleges in America). In it, I
found myself intellectually bored. Like, SUPER BORED. So, I decided to take a
night class at Smith in Women’s Herstory. The challenge I posed to myself was,
could I reprogram the historical timeline I had learned in school to be
benchmarked by women experiences and not by the traditional pedagogy of men,
religion and wars?
The answer is somewhat mixed. What I will say is that I have
no regrets in going through the exercise. I think rather, I walked away with an
abundance of new knowledge and a real frustration that Herstory isn’t
integrated in history. It’s generally some little blurb, a page or two that
you’ll read in March as a token to the women’s movement like we’re something
that happened one time and we haven’t actually been here all along. Again, it’s
like civil rights: there was a war, an amendment and we’re done talking about
it because it’s all better now. Right.
This blog is purposely more personal than the last. I think
it was getting into the specifics of stories that belonged to individuals that
really galvanized my commitment to the cause. Sometimes, when we paint with a
broad brush it’s harder to connect on a personal level. When we look at the
minutia, we relate person-to-person, heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul. When we
focus on each other through our shared human experience we are freer to
identify without barriers or boundaries.
So there are a few other peoples’ stories I’d like to share
with you. Mostly, the Women’s Movement relied on peaceful tactics to garner
attention, support and legislative change. Certainly those methods were adopted
and utilized effectively during the continued Civil Rights Movement in the
1960s. But some methods were more extreme—and the hunger strikes were one of
them.
I learned a lot more about them at the point I made it to
grad school and The Program for Women in Politics and Public Policy. There, I
was fortunate to see a screening of a fantastic film, Iron Jawed Angels, which
I recommend as a must see. Alice Paul is a huge character in the piece and they
focus on the horror of the hunger strikes in a way that film brings far more
tangibility to it than reading a paragraph in a text book ever will. Below is a
prison diary entry from Rose Winslow that expresses the personal account of the
solidarity that occurred inside those walls.
If this thing is necessary we will naturally go through with
it. Force is so stupid weapon. I feel so happy doing my bit for decency? For
our war, which is after all, real and fundamental. The women are all so magnificent, so beautiful. Alice Paul
is as thin as ever, pale and large-eyed. We have been in solitary for five
weeks. There is nothing to tell but that the days go by somehow. I have felt
quite feeble the last few days‹ faint, so that I could hardly get my hair
brushed, my arms ached so. But to-day I’m well again. Alice Paul and I talk
back and forth though we are at opposite ends of the building and a hall door
also shuts us apart. But occasionally? Thrills? We escape from behind our
iron-barred doors and visit. Great laughter and rejoicing!
My fainting probably means nothing except that I am not
strong after these weeks. I know YOU won’t be alarmed. I told about a syphilitic colored woman with one leg. The
other one was cut off, having rotted so that it was alive with maggots when she
came in. The remaining one is now getting as bad, They are so short of nurses
that a little colored girl of twelve, who is here waiting to have her tonsils
removed, waits on her. This child and two others share a ward with a syphilitic
child of three or four
years, whose mother refused to have it at home. It makes
you absolutely ill to see it....
Alice Paul is in the psychopathetic ward. She dreaded
forcible feeding frightfully, and I hate to think how she must be feeling, I
had a nervous time of it, gasping a long time afterward, and my stomach
rejecting during the process. I spent a bad, restless night, but otherwise I am
all right. The poor soul who fed me got liberally besprinkled during the
process. I heard myself making the most hideous sounds.... One feels so
forsaken when one lies prone and people shove a pipe down one’s stomach.
This morning but for an astounding tiredness, I am all
right. I am waiting to see what happens when the President realizes that brutal
bullying isn’t quite a statesmanlike method for settling a demand for justice
at home. At least, if men are supine enough to endure, women? To their eternal
glory? are not....
... Don’t let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul
vomits much. I do, too . . . . We think of the coming feeding all day. It is
horrible. The doctor thinks I take it well. I hate the thought of Alice Paul
and the others if I take it well...
All the officers here know we are making this hunger strike
that women fighting for liberty may be considered political prisoners; we have
told them. God knows we don’t want other women ever to have to do this over
again.
Source: Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (Salem, NH:
Ayer Co., 1920; reprint 1990): 246–7
I’m sure some people would regard Rose’s story, and the
other women who participated in the hunger strikes as inciting self-inflicted
wounds. It is interesting that one body of society could starve another of
basic human rights and then find themselves trivially agitated and forced into
action when that body of people turns the metaphor into a physical reality.
So because this is an entry of personal stories, I’d like to
highlight one more person to whom we women owe a shout-out. And that’s the man
who swayed the final count of the ratification. Traditionally, pro-sufferageist
wore a yellow rose and anti-sufferagests wore a red rose on their lapels. Harry
Burn, a 24 year old representative from East Tennessee wore a red
rose on August 18, 1920. But perhaps a leopard does change its spots.
“By the summer of 1920, 35 states had ratified the measure,
bringing it one vote short of the required 36. In Tennessee, it had sailed
through the Senate but stalled in the House of Representatives, prompting
thousands of pro- and anti-suffrage activists to descend upon Nashville.
If Burn and his colleagues voted in its favor, the 19th Amendment would pass
the final hurdle on its way to adoption.
After weeks of intense lobbying and debate within
the Tennessee legislature, a motion to table the amendment was
defeated with a 48-48 tie. The speaker called the measure to a ratification
vote. To the dismay of the many suffragists who had packed into the capitol
with their yellow roses, sashes and signs, it seemed certain that the final
roll call would maintain the deadlock.
But that morning, Harry Burn—who until
that time had fallen squarely in the anti-suffrage camp—received a note from
his mother, Phoebe Ensminger Burn, known to her family and friends as Miss
Febb. In it, she had written, 'Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them
in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been
watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet.' She ended
the missive with a rousing endorsement of the great suffragist leader Carrie
Chapman Catt, imploring her son to '
be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.' "
And so after generation upon generation of suffragists’
efforts, herstory advances one move at the request of the same person who got
all of us here into this world—a mother. Never doubt the power of one to better
the lives of the many. All of our stories and contributions are essential to
the collective battle of living lives of dignity, respect and fulfillment.
