This is the story of women who were ground-breakers. These brave women from the early 1900s made all the difference in the lives we live today.



The women were innocent and defenseless, but when, in North America ,
women picketed in front of the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote,
they were jailed.

And by the end of the first night in jail, those women 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.

(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.