Yesterday was Susan B. Anthony's Birthday
Roberta Kyle, Snr. Pol. Ed. | Monday, February 15, 2010 at 6:22PM 
Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820. I find it ironic that the great heroine of the women’s suffrage movement in America was born the day after Valentines Day, that smotheringly Victorian celebration of sweet-tempered good girls— that day of candy, romance and feminine softness.
I find a further irony in the fact that Anthony, who organized the first Women’s Congress in 1869,founded the Women’s Party and who fought tirelessly to get the vote for women, did not llive to see the success of her movement. It was in 1920, a full hundred years after Susan B. Anthony’s birth, that women in America were finally granted the right to step into the voting booth and pull the lever.
Today, we American women take our vote for granted as well as the right to own property, higher education and access to many professions that were once closed to us because of gender. We can control our reproductive life and choose to marry or not as we wish. American women today live in a different world than their mothers and grandmothers inhabited because of Susan B. Anthony and others like her.
The National Women’s Party, picketed the White House for months in 1917 to lobby for votes for women.
The Women Who Gave Me The Right To Vote
photo of Lucy Burns in JailLucy Burns was a driving force behind the picketing of President Woodrow Wilson’s White House beginning in January 1917. Six months later, she and Dora Lewis–targeting the attention of visiting Russian envoys–attracted controversy by prominently displaying a banner outside the White House declaring that America was not a free democracy as long as women were denied the vote.
Lucy Burns was arrested and imprisoned six times. She was among those in the Occoquan Workhouse who instigated hunger strikes in October 1917 and were subsequently placed in solitary confinement. Jailed again when protesting the treatment of the imprisoned Alice Paul, Burns joined Paul and others in another round of Occoquan hunger strikes. Burns was in Occoquan for what became known as the “Night of Terror” on November 15, 1917, during which she was beaten and her arms were handcuffed above her head in her cell.
Alice Paul was arrested for picketing the White House and sentenced to seven months in prison. In protest she began a hunger strike. She was brutally force fed and beaten and placed in solitary confinement for two weeks. She stood fast. Her jailers then tried to have her committed to a mental hospital but the physician in charge refused to declare her insane. He is said to have remarked ” courage in women is often mistaken for insanity”
It seems to me that often, it still is. Nevertheless, we’ve come a long way, baby. Thank you Lucy Burns, Alice Paul and all the women who worked and picketed and went to jail so that I can walk down to my local polling place and cast a vote today. And Happy Birthday to Susan B. Anthony, the woman born in 1820 who started it all for the women of America.
politics | tagged Susan B. Anthony, education for women, women's suffrage 
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Reader Comments (4)
It never stops astonishing me how recent both women's suffrage and the Civil War are in historical terms. My grandmother was born into a nation in which she could not vote. My great-grandparents came to a nation in which slavery was still legal. I think so many of us keep these facts in some foggy part of our brains--as if they happened in the Jurassic period or something. I do that myself sometimes. But when I remember how far away they are NOT, a lot of ugly things are more understandable, or at least put in context. Thanks for helping us all remember the important stuff. :)
Hope you had a Happy Susan B Anthony Day. (Hey that has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?)
Having been a Libber in the Seventies - by nature more than by political awareness - it galls me that today's young women take for granted many of the rights my own generation didn't have until we fought for and won them. Winning the right to vote was even a more difficult battle for women two gens before mine. Therefore, it infuriates me no end when a twenty-something says she can't be bothered to vote, or will vote the way her husband or S.O. tells her to. Or worse, women who won't vote but hold jobs in fields that only thirty years ago weren't open to women.
Susan B. Anthony's birthday should be a national holiday.
This is an amazing article, Roberta. It is so ironic, and hard to belief it was such a short while ago that these women suffered so we could live as we do now as women. Sad to say, I do take these wonderful women's feats of courage for granted. This is a wonderful reminder of all we women in America have to be thankful for. Thanks. -Michelle
Thanks for reminding us how much we owe to those before us. They have given us a pretty wonderful country, and surely a better life for women as the decades have progressed! It will continue to get better, but we need to keep our history in mind. We really do stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and we should honor them by voting.