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2010 is the 81st anniversary of the Persons Case in Canada, which finally declared women in Canada to be Persons!

Note: This is a Canadian version of November 15, 1917, Night of Terror – Women Fought for Our Rights from Amazing Women Rock. It’s been making the rounds by e-mail for several weeks, author unknown, with the request to share it.

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?

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.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

Silent sentinels picketing the White House

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, with 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, 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 November 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.

Resources for students, published with this story, by I Lee.

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