Voting Progress

ON NOVEMBER 14, 1917, several dozen women were demonstrating near the White House for the right of women to vote, were arrested, thrown into prison, and tortured brutally for two weeks. One of them was stripped naked and forced to stand for hours, her hands tied to a metal bar above her head. A court order set them free, and two months later President Woodrow Wilson announced that he had changed his mind, and supported women's right to vote, and the nineteenth amendment. The incident helped sparked more demonstrations which resulted in passage of the nineteenth amendment soon thereafter. In the United States of Antipathy, people are seldom if ever treated fairly unless and until fair treatment is forced upon them by coercive action, usually taking the form of protracted dampaigns, usually accompanied by repeated acts of violence.The USA is not a country which easily and quickly affords people equal justice under law, freedom, liberty, equality, or any of those virtuous ideals about which we Americans are so fond of bragging. In that important sense, the United States of America is a sham. From time to time, just as Jefferson predicted, the tree of liberty, of fundamental decency and fairness, requires teh nourishment of the blood of citizens and tyrants. Equality, true equality for ethnic minorities, women, homosexuals, and disabled people has been fought for fore centuries, and still has not been fully achieved, although we have come closer to its fruition.The old boys network the white male heterosexual christian patriarchy, like kudzu, diminishes and dies only with great exertion, resistance, and difficulty. The fact that it has defending it the formal structure of the Republican party, and the amorphous ambiance of Christian conservatism impedes and delays ist inevitable demise. conservative America fought tooth and nail to prevent women from voting, using various excuses, such as women are not inherently qualified for political participation, women are inferior, women are superior and ought to be above the fray, and so forth. Conservative America opposed civil rights for African-Americans, equal rights for women, gay rights, and universal social equality through legislation. Over the centuries conservative America has changed somewhat, but only through external compulsion, and not nearly enough, and too little, too late.