When American women picketed in front of the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote, they were jailed. Forty  prison guards wielding clubs and their warden �s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of �obstructing sidewalk  traffic. �

(Lucy Burns)
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.

(Dora  Lewis)
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed  her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, 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.

(Alice Paul)
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.

All women who have ever voted, have ever owned property, have ever enjoyed equal rights need to remember that women �s rights had to be fought for in Canada as well. Do our daughters and our sisters know the price that was paid to earn rights for women here, in North America ?  

2009 is the 80th Anniversary of the Persons Case in Canada, which finally declared women in Canada to be Persons!
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know, so that we remember to celebrate the rights we enjoy.
"Knowledge is Freedom: hide it, and it withers; share it, and it blooms" (P. Hill)

Spain

In the Basque provinces of Biscay and Guip�zcua women who paid a special election tax were allowed to vote and get elected to office till the abolition of the Basque  Fueros. Nonetheless the possibility of being elected without the right to vote persisted; hence Mar�a Isabel de Ayala was elected mayor in Ikastegieta in 1865. Woman suffrage was officially adopted in 1931 not without the opposition of Margarita Nelken and Victoria Kent, two female MPs (both members of PSOE), who argued that women in Spain and at that time, were far too immature and ignorant to vote responsibly, thus putting at risk the existence of the Second Republic. During the Franco regime only women that were considered heads of household were allowed to vote; in the �organic democracy type of elections called �referendums � (remember that Franco �s regimen was dictatorial) women were allowed to vote. From 1976, during the Spanish transition to democracy women fully exercised the right to vote and be elected to office.

Good night