Women's Suffrage        
   Part 1 of 3

   We are a country that others, tired and poor, desire to call their own. We also have a history that many of our own found discriminatory. Take women's suffrage, with emphasis on RAGE.

   Women in the old photos look peaceful enough, but they were fierce - braving ridicule, arrest, imprisonment and treatment bordering on torture, writes Liza Munday in Smithsonian magazine. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, but the movement began back in the 1840s, when married women had no right to property or ownership of their wages. 

   Women were shut out of most professions, and the idea of casting ballots was alien even to those who battled for rights. Ladies wanted the right to divorce abusive husbands, and to be represented in government. 

   Two decades later, the end of the Civil War produced a new obstacle: racial division. Attention shifted to the "Negro's hour," and women were told to stand aside while black men got to the polls first. Black women were just ignored. 

   The 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote. 

   Marches like we've seen in recent years are nothing new. In 1913 young women paraded down Pennsylvania Ave. appealing for a constitutional amendment. There were some 5,000 marchers, bands, floats and mounted brigades. 

   Spectators threw slurs and more; scores of women went to the hospital, but the event gave women the publicity they needed. Women later picketed the White House.

   Some were arrested on charges like "obstructing sidewalk traffic." Nearly 100 were taken to a workhouse. Some went on a hunger strike and were force-fed by a tube jammed into the nose. 

   In 1918, the first woman in Congress opened a debate on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which eventually prohibited states from discriminating against women in voting. 

   Not everyone cared. Many who had a newfound right to vote never did. 

Tomorrow: After the amendment