EDITORIAL: These women sacrificed their health, safety and reputation so you could vote

Aug. 2—Alice Paul joined hundreds of other suffragists in 1917 to picket at the White House for the right to vote. Standing at the gates with signs that said, "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?"she was the target of verbal and physical attacks from spectators. Eventually she was arrested by the police on a charge of obstructing traffic and sentenced to seven months in jail. While in jail, she organized a hunger strike in protest and was force-fed by doctors and threatened with admission to an insane asylum.

Lucy Burns also was part of the White House picketing campaign to support women's right to vote, and also was subjected to taunts and attacks from bystanders. She was arrested a total of six different times, with some arrests carrying a prison sentence of several months. During one particularly brutal sentence, prison guards handcuffed her arms above her head for a night. Like Paul, she went on a hunger strike while in prison and was force-fed.

Ida B. Wells co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913. It became the largest Black women's suffrage organization in the state. That year, she attended a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., but white suffragists refused to let Black women participate and told them there would be a segregated section for them. As a protest, Wells quietly left the parade site and rejoined two white colleagues who were sympathetic to her cause. A photograph of the three of them marching together down Pennsylvania Avenue appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Mary McLeod Bethune joined the Equal Suffrage League in 1912, but even after women's right to vote was secured in 1920, Black women still faced challenges. Bethune collected money to pay Black voters' "poll tax" and held night classes at the Florida school she founded so that prospective voters could read. That act drew the ire of the Ku Klux Klan, which threatened to burn her school; in response, she and some of her students held an all-night vigil in front of the building. After the Klan backed down, she led about 100 Black people to the polls to vote in their city's mayoral election.

These four women, and countless others whose names aren't necessarily written in the history books, believed voting was so important that they were willing to sacrifice their health, their safety and their reputation for securing that right.

It's now up to us to make sure their efforts weren't in vain. Exercise that right and go vote Tuesday.