Message from the Chair of Anthropology:
Greetings, ASA Members and Friends:
I would like to take this opportunity to wish you and yours a Merry Christmas,
Happy Chanukkah, Happy Diwali, Happy Eid -Eid Mubarak, and Happy Kwanzaa.
I would also like to thank you for your patience and understanding during the
present labour disruption at our University, a legal strike.
We all look forward to a fair settlement and then to a return to classes. We do
not yet know when the strike will end, but it will end in due course, and then
your First or Fall Term courses will be appropriately continued and completed,
and then the Second or Winter Term courses will follow on some revised
scheduling.
I recommend that you keep an eye on the York website or Y-File, www.yorku.ca,
for news from the Executive Committee of York's Senate, which is the body that
will issue policies for due changes in sessional dates and for
continuation/remediation scheduling and practices.
All best wishes,
David Lumsden,
Chair and
Undergraduate Program Director,
Department of Anthropology,
lumsden@yorku.ca
This message was circulated to us from Ashley @ Ryerson Women’s Center in light of the upcoming elections:
The Women’s Right to Vote, from Eileen Jensen
NOTE: As you read this, please remember the governmental chain-of-command that is required in order for a prison warden to acquire such power in this type of brutality: the state’s governor grants it to him, and the governor receives his orders from higher-up authoritarians; and so it goes. WHO IS IN POWER CAN MAKE OR BREAK A COUNTRY.
This is a true story.
The Womens RIGHT to vote .
This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years ago.
It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote. The women who made it so, by picketing the White House, were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they 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.’ The guards beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead. As a result, Alice 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 suffragettes 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. When one of the women’s 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.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because– why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO ‘s new movie, ’Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and
have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient. My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was–with herself. ‘One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,’ she said. ‘What would those women think of the way I use–or don’t use–my right to vote? All of us take it
for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.’ The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’
HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.
It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch that doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.’
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic,
republican or independent party – remember to vote. History is being made.
