how times change:Today in Herstory: The Suffragist “Prison Special” Comes to Chicago (5mar1919)
(please note the comments about the DEMOCRATIC congress that didn't pass the SBA, and the REPUBLICAN congress that is expected to pass it)
Today in Herstory: The Suffragist “Prison Special” Comes to Chicago
March 5, 1919: The “Prison Special” arrived in Chicago tonight, carrying suffragists who have served time in Washington, D.C.’s District Jail, or Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse for picketing the President along the White House fence.
. . . . .
The tour has been a big hit ever since its first stop in Charleston, South Carolina, where it generated the biggest mass meeting in the city’s history. The purpose of militant actions, from picketing to the speech-burning “Liberty Bonfires” is to secure action in Congress over the stalled Susan B. Anthony (nationwide woman suffrage) Amendment, center the attention of the country on the struggle for the vote, and remind people that President Wilson and his Democratic Party have been responsible for the failure of the Anthony Amendment to gain approval by the required 2/3 of House and Senate before being sent to the States for ratification.
Upon arrival here tonight, Lucy Burns recounted her experience with force-feeding:
I had been fasting for six days and nights when they started in on me. It was a terrible experience, a horrible attempt to break my will. Five men and two women were employed in doing it. The men would pin me to the floor, several of them holding my arms by my sides. If I struggled they would sit upon me. And while the men held me the women would insert a tube in my mouth through which a fluid of egg and milk would be forced into my stomach. I was weak from the fasting, but whenever I was strong enough I would refuse to let them insert the tube into my stomach that way. Food so taken is not nourishing. It is not meant to be. It was done simply to break my will.
Their jailhouse experiences certainly didn’t rob the suffrage prisoners of their sense of humor, as can be noted from the songs they sang in prison and shared here tonight. This one is to the tune of “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad.” S.B.A. is the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, Zinkham is the D.C. Jail’s warden, and “Woodrow” refers to President Wilson:
We’ve been starving at the Workhouse, all the live long day.
We’ve been starving in the Workhouse, just to pass the S.B.A.
Don’t you hear old Zinkham calling,
Rise up so early in the morn;
Don’t you see the Senate moving,
Woodrow blow your horn!
. . . . .
Fortunately, the Democratic-controlled 65th Congress ended yesterday, and as a result of the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s targeting of specific anti-suffrage Senators for defeat in the November elections, and the National Woman’s Party’s targeting of all Democrats as the “party in power” and therefore responsible for the failure of the Anthony Amendment to pass, there now appear to be enough votes in both Senate and House in the new Republican-controlled 66th Congress for passage of the Anthony Amendment. But even though there is reason for optimism that there is now a large enough Republican majority to overcome entrenched Southern Democratic opposition, nothing is being taken for granted, and the campaign will go on at full force until passage of the Anthony Amendment is achieved.
http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/03/05/today-in-herstory-the-suffragist-prison-special-comes-to-chicago/
