National Nurses United

RAD_June 7/30/10 6:01 PM Page 11 Rose Ann DeMoro Executive Director, National Nurses United Making History, Again On the 90th anniversary of the women's vote, RNs continue the fight started by nurse suffragists before them. or some who take our most basic rights for granted, it may be hard to imagine that for nearly 150 years in our republic, American women were denied the right to vote. After decades of struggle, with nurses frequently in the forefront, withstanding arrests, physical attacks, verbal abuse, harassment and retaliation against women for advocating suffrage, Congress finally acted, passing the 19th Amendment, which became law on Aug. 26, 1920. The California Nurses Association/NNU will honor that tradition with a special celebration marking the 90th anniversary on Aug. 26 in Sacramento, Calif. We'll be marching to the Capitol at 3 p.m. and rallying on its west steps at 4 p.m., joined by other labor and community groups, and other women and men from across the state, and hopefully many of you. (See back cover for details) We will also highlight the disgrace of a billionaire, who happens to be female, who has the audacity to run for the highest office in California after having squandered the opportunity to vote for much of her adult life. After a scathing report on her shoddy voting record in the Sacramento Bee last fall, Meg Whitman went on Fox News to concede that "I voted in the 1984 election in California. I remember it clearly." In another interview, among the few she does, Whitman, the CEO billionaire, acknowledged, "I was not as engaged in the political process as I should have been. I was doing lots of other things" such as "building companies" like eBay where, among other priorities, she laid off scores of employees and outsourced 40 percent of the work overseas. Now she is finally voting this year, so she can vote for herself. Nor is she validating her credentials as a woman who could lead a unified California, but instead cynically exploiting her wealth to own the airways and denounce any opposition to her royal privilege with F JUNE 2010 pledges to spend up to $180 million out of her own purse by November. The absurdity does not end there. A central plank of her campaign is to slash 40,000 public service jobs, a majority of them held by working women, and further cut the social safety net, which will also disproportionately affect those most in need of social services, single mothers. And yet another badge of honor is her treatment of women employees as a corporate CEO, including the massive outsourcing of jobs and the notorious pushing incident involving a subordinate woman to whom Whitman had to pay a settlement of $200,000 after an altercation about which Whitman is still not telling the full story. Not exactly the model for women in this historic anniversary year. Contrast that record with the struggles of women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chatman Catt, Alice Paul, and so many others who were jailed, beaten, spit at, threatened, and yet defied it all while working day after day and year after year for the simple, yet powerful, right of women to exercise their franchise. These women linked the fight for suffrage to other progressive causes. In a 1912 speech, Rose Schneiderman, suffragist and trade union leader, mocked those who opposed suffrage as un-ladylike. "Surely these women won't lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round. There is no harder contest than the contest for bread." Nurses were prominent in the suffrage drive, as they were in other democratic, social justice, and progressive movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. It makes sense. As early RN pioneers were struggling with mostly male hospital administrators and doctors to establish the professional recognition and accreditation of nursing and win improvements in nurses' professional standards, compensation, and working W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G conditions, so too were many of these same RN leaders in the foreground of campaigns for unions, public health, social welfare, and many other causes. Consider Lillian Wald. A public health nurse and one of the most noted social reformers of the early 20th century, Wald opened the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City to provide healthcare and other services to immigrant women and other poor residents. She was also a founder of the Women's Trade Union League at a time when most unions were closed to women, and a prominent peace activist. And she was an outspoken suffragist. In her 1915 book, The House on Henry Street, Wald talks with pride about a famous suffrage march she helped organize in New York City in 1913 behind the Henry Street banner "with its symbol of universal brotherhood" and a "goodly company carrying flags with the suffrage demand in ten languages." With Wald was her close friend Lavinia Dock, another public health nurse, one of the foremost nurse writers and educators of her era, and a major suffrage activist. Dock was arrested for trying to vote in 1896, was among 13 women who made a 13-day "suffrage hike" from New York City to Albany in 1912, and a frequent pamphleteer for suffrage. By 1917, Dock was in Washington working with noted suffragist Alice Paul where she led the first suffrage pickets from the National Women's Party headquarters to the White House and was jailed three times for participation in suffrage protests. In an interview years later Paul recalled one of the most famous suffrage marches in Washington in 1913. "One of the largest and loveliest sections was made up of uniformed nurses. It was very impressive," Paul recalled. Nurses, marching and singing for their rights, and justice for all. It's a proud tradition, one that Whitman has blotted, but one we will celebrate Aug. 26 once again. Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of National Nurses United. N AT I O N A L N U R S E 11

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