The forgotten American Apertheid: how women fought for their right to vote

By Hector Hereter
Special for Puerto Rico Daily Sun

Senator John McCain and the Republican party in a bold political move (or should we say in a well asserted political marketing strategy?), provided the option to women voters what the Democrats discarded during the primaries; to place a female figure in the new administration at the White House.
If McCain elected, this will be the first time in America History a woman will enter the Oval Office as an official team member with the potential to become president in case her boss passes away.
That move from McCain’s camp had paid off: A new Washington Post/ABC News survey finds McCain is now ahead of Obama by 12 points among white women, 53 to 41 percent. “Sarah Palin´s appeal to female voters goes even higher than her 3 inches high heels shoes”, Elio Ohep, a editor of the virtual publication http://www.petroleumworld.com/ in Venezuela. “She fills the US women profile of working mother with several family chores that is expeted to accomplish plus being a competitive professional”.
There is not doubt in anybody’s mind that the female electorate, along with the other two main minorities, Hispanics and Afro-Americans, will hold one of the wildcards in the coming elections, although the most recent polls point Obama as a sure winner with 344 asured electoral votes and McCain with a far back 164 electoral votes. .
But this achievement, of having a woman in the presidential ticket, was almost unthinkable less than a century ago, when them were forbidden from attending the polls, even those that dare to ask for this democratic right suffered imprisonment and even torture by the establishment.
Our great-grandmothers and grandmothers had to put a fierce fight against Woodrow Wilnson's Democrat administration in order to be recognized as a participating part in the democratic exercise of power.

A well deserve tribute
As a homage to those courageous women at the beginning of the XX century, we make a recolecction of those moments when unimaginable sacrifices were made to assure somenthing that today many think of it as granted.
Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were allowed to attend the polls and vote.
They were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf

Next page
Some women won't vote this year because they have many chores to do that day: have carpool duties, have to take down the kids to the soccer practice, have to get to work, or even worse, the self-defeat idea that “our vote doesn't matter”;“no matter who we elect everything will continue to be the same”. Then, what about the battle those XX Century women waged so future generations could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have their own saying in their country’s affair.
Yes, democracy gives everyone the right of attending or no to the polls, but this simple exercise of participation means a lot in the years ahead.
This coming November 4th, the United States will not only will elect its 45th President, but it will set a new course in the American political landscape. Not just because the Democrat candidate has a darker skin that the preceding residents in the White House, or because a woman integrates the Republican ticket, but for the change of the perception Americans have of themselves as a country.
Jacob Weisberg, American political journalist, currently serving as editor-in-chief of Slate Group, a division of The Washington Post Company, and a columnist for the Financial Times, said in one of his latest columns that “many have a discourse on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, racism and our long attitude of xenophobic to foreigners in the rearview mirror” of American history.
“It will allow us to go to the next page and start a new chapter for us and the world” assured Valentina McPhearson, an American expatriate living in Caracas and who will be one of the very few US citizens in Bogotá, Colombia that will cast their absentee ballots next November.

One big winning card under the sleeve
Minorities will have a major role in the Nov. 4th election and Hispanic women among them will be an important factor on the final outcome.
According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), at least 9.1 million Latinas are U.S. citizens who are 18 years or older – the population of Latinas who are generally eligible to register to vote and cast ballots in November’s Presidential election.
In the last three Presidential elections, points out NALEO, female voters have tended to turnout in slightly higher rates than male voters, and Latina turnout rates have been slightly higher than the comparable rates for male Latinos. For example, in 2004, 49% of the Latina electorate cast ballots, compared to 45% of the male Latino electorate
On the issues that concern the most to Hispanic women, right after the war in Iraq, is immigration probleme, and many of them consider that the actual Republican hasn’t fulfilled their expectations on the last eight years.
Gabriela Martínez, a young Mexican woman recently deported back to her country and mother of a nine year old boy born in the US, in an interview by BBC International, said that many of her fellow Mexican women that had obtained their citizenship will cast their ballots having immigrations as their major concern.
“I was deported because American authorities considered me a threat to US security”, said Martínez to the BBC correspondent in Mexico City. “That’s bigotry and a big injustice, all I did while I was in “el Norte” was to work and raise my kid”.
The Latina electorate includes women from a wide range of Latino national origin and sub-groups. Over half are Mexican (56%), 15% are Puertorricans, 5% are either Cuban, Central American or South American, and 3% are Dominican.
But even those with American citizenship by birth, such as Ivel Picas, a Puertorriican housewife living in Providence, Rhode Island, says that Hispanics are united under the immigration problem and reject how the present administration had unfairly treated Hispanics without a legal status in the country.
“Both parties better come with clear message on this subject if they want to win, because Hispanics, and mostly the women, have the winning card under our sleeves”, said Pico.
But besides the immigration problem Hispanic women have other deeper reasons for attending the polls next November. In many of their countries of origin democracy is sometimes more a privilege of a few than a constitutional right of the many. Or yet worse their ballots are worthless because the actual regime shamelessly manipulates the outcome.
Also, for many Hispanic women is an opportunity to challenge the macho social prevalence in their own cultures. It gives them the chance to send the message to their male fellows “we are just as equal to you as you are to us”, something unthinkable in many countries South of the border.
Just as the former President Theodore Roosevelt said once: “A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user”.

hhereter@yahoo.com

Hereter is an independent Public Relations consultant and had worked on special assigments for Fortune 100 companies in the Oil and Airline industries. He lives in Caracas, Venezuela