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

In the Treshhold of new era

By Hector J. Hereter

CARACAS.- “Here you will see World Leaders and Leaders that want to rule the world” says CNN’s Christiana Amampour in one of the many network’s international promotions. Among the images flashing in the background are Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden and Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but not one of the producers in Atlanta would have the audacity to place an image of an U.S. President, not even that of the growing unpopular George W. Bush.
Well, like or not CNN’s editors,and the American public in general, the next elected White House resident will rule the world one way or another as it had happened since the end of World War II. Even the most insignificant decision taken in the Oval Office will have a ripple effect on the rest of the world, impacting most of all Latin America, the so called “U.S. backyard”.
A backyard that has been neglected for as long as the actual Republican Administration has being in office, letting to grow wild weed and other bushes that make a difficult path for any American to find its way through the several adversarial off-springs in the region, such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. Even its allies in the region, like Colombia, Perú, Chile and El Salvador feel neglected for the lack of attention to their problems and economic interests, creating a power vacuum not seem since the end of the cold war.
As one Venezuelan economist explains it: “The State Department’s near sighted policy has created frictions even with their most important allies like Colombia and Perú. Washington ambivalence is driving crazy those power brokers in Bogotá and Lima”.
And the vaccum is there, but as it’s stated by the law of physics in this dimension cann’t exist empty spaces, so Venezuela following a simple design of Real Politik of power through financing has come to fill that space.
All terrain lost by the Soviets since the fall of Communist regime has being recovered back, not as much for their own effort, but by those off springs that see an opportunity to break away from Washington influence.
So far Hugo Chavez’s regime has spent more that 3 billion dollars in arms manufactured by Moscow, and he and President Dmitry Medvedev announced that Venezuela would purshase $30 billion in military goods from Russia over the next six years, including planes, submarines, tanks and Kalashnikovs.
More recently Moscow annaunced the deployment of Russian vessels in Venezuela’s main Navy bases and President Hugo Chavez said recently that Venezuelan and Russian ships could soon hold joint naval exercises in the Caribbean, an historical turning point due the fact that there has not been European military presence in the Americas since the Hipanic-American war back of 1898.
So there is not doubt that US has lost a lot of solid terrain, even bigger compared to what happened right after the invasion to Bay of Pigs in 1961.

Some came for freedom, some came for gold
But why Latin America being an important strategical point for the US’s interest has been neglected for so long by the power players in Washington? Why Latin Americans are perceived as the “little people” and treated as such creating a great resentment upon those that should be Washington’s strongest allies?
The answer could be found in the very own US heart: the Nation’s Capitol. On the Rotunda’s circling overhead there are two paintings that hold the clue of our cosmic differences.
In one of the eight paintings on the top bordering the dome we can see the Protestant pilgrims on the deck of the ship Speedwell before their departure for the New World from Delft Haven, Holland, on July 22, 1620. The prominence of women and children suggests the importance of the family in the community. At the left side of the painting is a rainbow, which symbolizes hope and divine protection.
On a second fresco in the opposite side of the dome, Christopher Columbus is shown landing in the West Indies, on an island that the natives called Guanahani and he named San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. The captains of the Niña and Pinta follow, carrying the banner of Ferdinand and Isabella. The crew displays a range of emotions, some searching for gold in the sand. Natives watch from behind a tree.
For many these could be very nice portraits of our beginnings as nations, but a more inquisitive observer will detect differences such as the Pilgrims were whole families, while Columbus expedition was integrated by male only.
The Pilgrims came to a untamed land to set new rules and scape from being persecuted for thinking different from the European "status quo". They didn't come looking for gold as their Spanish counterparts did, they came for freedom and start a country from anew.
But at the same time by having the choice of selecting a mate genetically the same, the country’s fate was established to be a white race dominant landscape for the years to come. Divisions were well settled; a self awareness of what group everyone belonged.
While further South, in the Conquistadores domains, the choices for selecting a partner from the same race were very dim or nonexistent.
Therefore, after being aboard for three months in a very cramped vessel from Spain, once the set foot on the new land they didn’t waist time in selecting a new woman to be their partner in the territories just discovered or conquered.
Those Spaniards, that were free from a wife waiting for them back home and willing to break their necks if they found out their husbands were in extramarital affairs with an native woman, bore offsprings that became the birthmark of the Latin American nations. A cosmic race. A sum of all the races that walked the planet if we take into consideration that the Conquistadores brought their own mixtures of Arabs and Africans genes running through their veins. A new cosmic race was born. While North of Rio Grande waited for more than 500 years for the Christopher Columbus phenomenon to make effect.

No white, nor black.
All along the National Democratic Convention in Denver in August, CNN’s anchorman Wolf Blitzer, kept saying that “we are witnessing an historical event, this is the first time a major US political party nominates a black man”. Well, we would like to correct Mr. Blitzer because Obama is no white nor black.
Americans that are accustomed to classify people’s identity by the color of their skin Obama may be black, in other words, a “kid from the other block” but for us in Latin America Obama resembles the neighbor’s kid, since he belongs to that racial mixture very common in many Spanish speaking countries, mostly in the Caribbean basin.

Cultural sensitivity
Republicans like to say that Obama lacks the international experience to be Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation on the world, and it may be true since Obama has never sat in a States Department’s office or participated in an world military strategy as his ticket partner Joe Biden, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. But the Democratic Presidential Candidate will be the first White House resident if elected, different no just because the color of his skin, but for his cultural sensitivity that not other previous President had.
Born out a all white American woman and a black man from deep inside Kenya; taught the principles of life by his Indonesian stepfather, attending school in Jakarta, nurtured by his grandparents in Hawaii, a state that holds many traces of the races that ran through the Pacific and the forefront to Asia, Obama has a cosmic view of the world.
During the primaries Obama said that he will redesign US international relations by initiating new conversations with adversaries in the world arena such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Korea, a proposal strongly criticized by his opponent at the time and today one of his biggest allies, Hillary Clinton. She said that it “was crazy to go to a bargaining table without an previously set agenda”.
Maybe to explore what the adversary thinks is the best way to set a new agenda and discard those that have being in place for more than 50 years with not evident benefits, such as is the case with Cuba, and the agendas imposed by the hardcore anti Castro lobbyists from Miami.
Obama, because of his background where there is not a well established frontier between black and white, have learned how to negotiate on both sides of the racial spectrum. At Harvard, long confused about his identity, learned to negotiate across color lines, and whites began to see him as redemptive figure.
If he is elected as the 45Th President, he promised to be more than that, he said that he wants to be one that build new bridges with other nations around the world, sort of a Pontiff if we like, because this Latin word (Pontifice) means “bridge builder”, and the Pope is not the only that can hold that adjective. It is possible that we are standing in the threshold of new era, just as Columbus and his men crossed 516 years ago and became America´s bridge to the rest of the world.

hhereter@yahoo.com