By Bonnie Adams, Managing Editor
Northborough – With just a few months away until this year’s historic November presidential election, voting is on the minds of many Americans. For only the third time in our nation’s history, there will be a woman running for vice president – Sen. Kamala Harris of California. And a raging world-wide pandemic has thrown the safety of in-person voting in question. Mail-in ballots have become a political fireball.
But 2020 also marks another important occasion in history – the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment which finally granted women the right to vote. And that right, members of the GFWC Northboro Junior Woman’s Club say, is not one that should be disregarded.
On Aug. 22, the Club’s members, dressed in period garb, held an event on the Town Common where they recited speeches that were originally given by Suffragists like Alice Paul, Ida Wells and Lucy Burns, to mark the 100th anniversary.
The Club’s president, Martha Michalewich, noted that GFWC International, of which the NJWC is affiliated with, has partnered with the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial in Virginia. The memorial will feature plaques from different clubs as it honors the hundreds of women who were jailed under harsh circumstances as they fought to win the right for American women to vote.
The women’s Suffrage movement spanned over 70 years, Michalewich said, starting in 1848, with the Seneca Falls Convention held in Seneca, N.Y.
At that historic meeting, 300 men and women debated and discussed the many inequities that women suffered at that time, including being forbidden to vote, leading to decades of activism.
It was in 1917 that the National Women’s Party took the drastic action of picketing the White House every day for two years to bring attention to the cause.
“It’s important to remember that in 1918 there was a worldwide Spanish flu,” Michalewich said. “These women still protested daily.”
Although the demonstrations started off peaceful, as the United States entered World War I, criticism of President Woodrow Wilson was deemed unpatriotic.
Over the course of 18 months, over 200 women from 26 states were arrested on charges of “obstructing traffic” and rather than admit guilt or pay fines they instead served time in jail. The conditions were cold, unsanitary, and often violent, and hunger strikes became common as the women stuck to their beliefs. Guards did not want the women to become “martyrs” so they force fed the prisoners.
“Their harsh treatment was reported widely in the papers, raising the public’s awareness of what women they had admired were willing to endure to win the vote,” Michalewich said.
Finally, in 1920, the 72-year struggle ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment. That may not have happened, Michalewich noted, without the help of the GFWC, particularly one member, Febb Burn, whose 24-year-old son was a member of the Tennessee legislature. After she wrote to him encouraging him to vote to ratify the amendment, he did so, thus breaking a tie, and allowing the vote to pass. It was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920.
Now, as Americans contemplate this November’s election, the NJWC is urging everyone who is eligible to exercise their right to vote.
“But it’s your choice on who to vote for – we are strictly non-partisan. It is not up to us to tell you who to vote for – we just want you to vote,” Michalewich stressed.
“Women fought for so long for this right. Shame on us if we don’t use it.”
photos/Cheryl Arsenault
