Starving for the Vote

What they don’t tell you in history class

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.

Have Women's History stories and facts to share? Women's History questions for Korri? Please comment below or visit us on Facebook, we welcome your comments and questions.

About the author

Korri Piper has a Bachelor’s Degree in English with a concentration in The Dramatic Arts and holds a Graduate Certificate from the Program for Women in Politics and Public Policy. For more than 11 years she has worked in the field of marketing in varied industries. Korri is fascinated by behavioral sociology. She enjoys staying active, the continued pursuit of knowledge and consideration and righteous social justice work. Korri is parent to an incredibly precocious daughter who reminds her – regularly – that life offers infinite proof of our fallibility, that humor is just a good approach to being and that active listening is the best base for relationships.