Women’s History Month - “Our History is our Strength” By Martha Wheelock, Board Member, BWHA, Filmmaker. March is Women’s History Month, and the National Women’s History Alliance encourages us all to continue the recognition of the Centennial of the 19th Amendment, granting all American women their right to vote. Our current pandemic deferred many events to celebrate the long road for women to win the vote. But the delay in 2020 is in keeping with how the 1918 pandemic nearly derailed the suffrage movement in the middle of their 70-year campaign for their enfranchisement. On the brink of the 19th amendment’s passage by Congress, to go out to the states for ratification, suffragists halted their campaigns to align themselves with the public health mandates of no mass meetings or gatherings. There could be no more parades, no more lobbying, no rallies, no more petitions or speaking tours, or even door to door canvassing. Resourceful suffragists had to call on their perseverance to devise creative ways to demand their right to vote before the public and Congress. With no social media and limited radio, their tools were paper – mailings, ads in newspapers, and even papering trees with their arguments.
Photo’s: Library of Congress www.loc.gov
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WWW.HomelandMagazine.com / MARCH 2021
The women called upon Americans to recognize their contributions to World War I, which began in April 1917 and was winding down by late 1918. Women had volunteered as nurses, doctors, and train conductors. They took over the work in fields and agricultural processing (“Farmerettes”); they were crucial workers in factories, making bombs and products. Woman’s Right to Vote was certainly a proper reward for their wartime work and sacrifice. The 1918 pandemic also reduced the “troops” of women working for Suffrage; many succumbed to the Flu, including suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, “chained to her bed” by the flu. Suffragists nursed pandemic victims. This “sudden and sweeping epidemic of influenza… is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle to our …campaigns, “ (Carrie Chapman Catt, President, National American Suffrage Association, to supporters, 1918)