The University of Idaho Argonaut

She refused to eat for 78 hours.

Dr. J.A. Gannon, chief resident physician at the Asylum Hospital for the Occoquan Workhouse jail in Virginia, forcibly fed her by using metal clamps and shoving a rubber tube down her throat. Authorities denied access of her own medical practitioner.

But this wasn’t the first time Alice Paul had been to prison after protesting for the right for women to vote. Nor was it the first time she had started a hunger strike while in jail and had to be forcibly fed to keep her alive.

But women like Paul and her friend Lucy Burns had one thing on their minds in 1917 — enfranchisement. They wanted the right to vote for women, and they wouldn’t stop until they had it.
Most people have never heard their names, and popular history has largely forgotten them. But women in the United States can thank them for revitalizing the suffrage movement every time they step into a poll booth, said University of Idaho history professor Ian Chambers.
Chambers has taught a specialized course in the history of American women for four years.

“Burns and Paul reformed the movement, which had become stagnant,” he said. “They wanted to bring this thing to the threshold, this (movement) that had fallen behind. They wanted to move forward.”
Paul and Burns were originally members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which had been led by better known suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but they broke away to form their own group — the National Women’s Party.

“They didn’t want to pander to these older women who had been in the movement for a long time,” Chambers said. “They had gotten a little bit older and gotten satisfied with what they had already (achieved.)”
Paul and Burns had been involved with more “in your face” tactics in the British Suffragette Movement, Chambers said, and the more radical and direct action protests they were successfully involved with in England gave them confidence the same tactics could work in the United States.
“They weren’t prepared to stop,” he said. “I don’t think most people understand that these women were prepared to put themselves to death with the hunger strike for their cause.”

Sandra Reineke, a UI political science and women’s studies professor, said it is important to remember women began to truly fight for the right to vote after they were not allowed to participate in abolitionist causes in the 1800s, and some held political positions before they were even allowed to vote.
The first female mayor, Susana Salter, was elected mayor of Argonia, Kan., in 1887 — 33 years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving all American women the right to vote. Women were elected to state and U.S. Congresses before they were given the right to vote.
Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote in 1869 — almost 50 years before women across the country would be able to cast a ballot. Other western states, including Idaho and Utah, soon followed.

“These women said, ‘If certain states can have it, why the hell can’t the rest of the country?” Chambers said. “They were geographically distant from the center of power. These were younger women, and these states were being formed after the Civil War. They had gone through a lot. The women who moved out there had to be forceful and develop different attitudes just to survive.”
Reineke said some states may have included the right to vote for women so they would appear to have a larger population base when it came to national issues.

“From my understanding, some did it to increase a small population size,” she said. “(The states) could be included and involved with more on a federal level.”
The suffragette movement is a critical part of this country’s history and has shaped the developments and opportunities women have in the current political realm, Chambers said.
“If we ignore the contribution these women have made to their country, we are depriving … 50 percent of the country’s population of their history,” he said. “We have to recognize non-elite women had a great contribution to American growth and movement.”

Shirley Caldwell was talking politics before she was tall enough to see above a poll booth.
“When I was a child in elementary school, before I was voting, kids would always ask me ‘who’s your dad voting for?’” she said.
But at 82, Caldwell is one of the first generations of women who were asked who her mother was voting for as well.
“She just accepted it as being important,” Caldwell said. “She never thought about it any other way.”
Caldwell spent her childhood in Lincoln, Neb., with a Republican father and Democratic mother before eventually finding a home in Moscow. The political presence in her childhood home stuck with her throughout her life and is something she felt she had to pass on to her children when she started a family of her own, she said.

“I made sure my children knew how important it is,” Caldwell said. “They grew up watching that voting was important to my husband and me.”
She’s been casting her vote for more than 60 years. Volunteering at the Latah County Democrat office, writing letters to the editor and to Congressmen and putting up political signs in her lawn are practices she maintains almost every year.

“I vote whenever I get the chance,” she said. “I never miss a time to vote. It’s like an obligation to me.”

A signigicant growing trend shows she's not alone.
“More women now vote than men,” Reineke said.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics, in every presidential election since 1980, the number of eligible female voters has exceeded the number of eligible male voters.
The total number of women voters has exceeded the overall total number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964.
In the 2000 presidential election, 61 percent of women who were eligible to vote did, compared to 58 percent of eligible males, Reineke said.
“It’s important to keep in mind that the majority of women vote,” she said. “And these women lean to the left, the Democratic side of things, and the reason for that is socioeconomic status.”

Bill Lund, a UI professor of political science, agreed.
“There has been a gender gap present since 1980,” he said, “and (women) tend to vote more Democratic. (Political scientists) believe it’s probably not so much about social issues such as abortion or gay rights … they have a more negative perception of the economy.”
According to the CAWP, the gender gap in voting refers to the “difference in the percentage of women and the percentage of men voting for a given candidate.”
Women who are unmarried, women who have a college education and women of color all tend to vote more Democratically, while women with traditional values tend to vote for Republicans, Lund said.

Lund said it may be impossible to tell if more women will vote in this election than in past years, but he said they might because of the turnout in this year’s primaries.
“There was certainly evidence that (candidates) were bringing more women into the polls,” he said.

Reineke said there is a broader issue at work when it comes to women voting for women, which has been especially prevalent with high-profile candidates such as Sen. Hillary Clinton for president and Gov. Sarah Palin for vice president.
“The question is, do women have specific issues that they would like to see addressed?” she said. “Do they have a leader that they want to vote for that will work on these issues like family, reproductive rights and education? … Are they in a specific political realm different than men’s? We have found out that they are.”

She said women don’t necessarily ask themselves if the sex of the candidate matters to address issues. Men and women voters don’t ask themselves if a male candidate could address political policy better just because he is male, she said.
“It is more important to a voter to determine where (a candidate) stands on an issue,” Reineke said.
The 2007 French presidential election is a good example that shows women don’t always vote for a woman just because she is female, Reineke said.
Last year, Segolene Royal lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in the election after Sarkozy captured enough of both the male and female vote to win.
Gender aside, Royal simply didn’t appeal to women with her stance on the election’s major issues, she said.

Reineke said Clinton was able to capture the working male vote, even though she was female. It is misleading to assume a candidate’s perceived identity shapes the voting outcome, she said.
“She could appeal to men because of the policies that she stands for, that she supports,” she said.
Lund, Chambers and Reineke agreed the female candidates in this presidential election have been judged and treated differently by the public and the media.

“I feel … that female candidates were scrutinized in certain ways that male candidates weren’t,” Reineke said. “The (Sen. John) McCain campaign purposely used that scrutiny by the media, tapping into Palin so she would be talked about a lot … The more noise in the machine, the better, right?”
The same scrutiny was applied to Sen. Clinton, she said.
“There was a lot of scrutiny of how she was holding up, how prepared she was, how she didn’t have a military background,” Reineke said.
She said questioning certain aspects of Clinton’s military background is setting a double standard because women are not allowed to be on the American military’s front lines.
Chambers said he saw differences in how Clinton has been judged by the media as well.
“You saw a number of times how the media was seeing how Clinton was managing,” he said. “Did it make a difference? Who knows? But it makes a difference with the commentators.”

No matter how the media portrays a woman’s role in politics, women retain the right to have a say in today’s government.
The political process should be respected and taken seriously, Caldwell said.
She said it has been interesting to see how the roles of women in politics has evolved over time, including the close Democratic primary race with Clinton.
She said she believes women still respect the hardships placed before women on the road to enfranchisement.
“I think women see (voting) as a right so they go and do it,” she said. “I do feel it’s a privilege. I wouldn’t pass it up for anything.”