Don’t be surprised when you see me wearing yellow and purple. Those two colors have a special meaning to women, and if you don’t know what that is, then you haven’t been reading your history books.

Those vivid colors signify a brave and painful seven-decade struggle. There was a time when only women of the stiffest spines dared wear them. They were the colors of the Suffrage Movement that eventually won women the right to vote.

If you’re a real student of the movement that changed the world, you also know that yellow roses were the suffrage flowers (while the American Beauty red rose was the bloom for those who fought women’s enfranchisement). Ever since I learned that – and found that at one point, the fight was called “The War of the Roses” – I’ve had trouble appreciating the red rose. Just as I can’t think of President Woodrow Wilson anymore without a new disgust.

My knowledge and appreciation for a woman’s right to vote has been greatly elevated by a wonderful new book by Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift called Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment. It’s part of the “Turning Points” series being published by John Wiley & Sons, which has asked prominent writers to offer “fresh, personal perspectives on the defining events of our time.”

Suffrage is not only a subject that has long fascinated me, but one that I fear gets short shrift from even those dedicated to American history – it’s too often a footnote, even though it was revolutionary. Over the years, I’ve read a variety of books on the issue, I’ve written about the struggle, even shared a poignant moment with the last living suffragette, Alice Paul, one rainy night in Washington, D.C., when I was a graduate student.

Despite all of that, even I was stunned by Clift’s retelling of the story – particularly how brutal it got and how much individual women physically suffered so that my sisters and I could one day vote.

Clift says she wrote the book at the urging of longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas, because she’s afraid too many don’t know the story at all. She recounts how she and Thomas spoke to a group of high school girls who seemed to think the right to vote just “fell from the sky,” or that it was a kind of birthright.

Although it should have been, it certainly wasn’t. And once you know the story, you really can’t think about voting the same way again. And it strikes me as particularly loathsome that women could ever stay away from the polls on election day.

So, here’s a reminder to all you girlfriends: There’s a R-E-A-L-L-Y big election right around the corner. And we all must be there. Democrats and Republicans.

Guys, I’m not leaving you out. In fact, I’ve found another book recently that can help you, too: MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country. The subhead is: “How to find your political voice and become a catalyst for change.” In case you fear this is a Democratic treatise, the cover includes a quote from popular Republican columnist Arianna Huffington, calling it a “user-friendly ‘how to’ guide for fixing our broken democracy.”

It’s an inspirational book of some 50 short essays – culled from 2,500 entries – by people from all over the country who have made a difference. As the editors say, their stories “will dispel any foolish cynicism about public apathy.”

These are the stories of people who love their country and have personally stepped forward to make sure it works as the constitution promises. There are chapters on “the power of connecting,” on “every vote counts,” on “the many faces of the media,” on “political action is personal,” and on “personal action is political.”

In short, if you’ve ever thought, “I need to do something,” this book tells you of successes others have had. It’s a modern-day, sexy civics class.
Here’s one of the book’s ideas that I like: “Give your friends and family extra incentive to vote by holding an Election Day party or dinner to watch the returns.” I also like the suggestion of getting your children involved in the election process, and I’m particularly proud that KidsVoting started right here in Arizona.

Or you can do what my friend Hans Olson is doing the night of October 3 – “The Last Chance to Register Concert.” Hans is an Arizona treasure and brilliant bluesman who is signing up a variety of musical acts to perform at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix. The night is significant because the next day is the final deadline for registering to vote in the November 2 General Election.
But if you’re looking for more inspiration, check out the new MoveOn book. If there’s one theme, it’s best expressed in an essay by author and journalist Gail Sheehy: “There are four words that get any politician’s attention when voiced passionately by a constituent group: We’re not going away.”

I love books like this because it drives me absolutely nuts when I hear people say things like: “It doesn’t make any difference if it’s Republicans or Democrats, they’re all alike”; or “It’s my American right to NOT vote”; or “My vote doesn’t count anyway.” I’m not sure if those people can’t read or aren’t paying attention or are just plain ignorant, but they’re totally wrong. And while some of my pals think we’re better off that such know-nothings aren’t participating in the democratic process, I can’t go there. There’s always too much at stake to be so irresponsible, it seems to me.

So, I’ll continue my crusade. Let’s just say it’s one way of repaying those courageous founding sisters.

You know the names of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton and Alice Paul, but you’ve probably never even heard the name Esther Morris, the “Mother of Suffrage.” Yet this determined woman got the vote for Wyoming women in 1869 – a full 51 years before the federal government passed the 19th Amendment.

One of my favorite stories about the West is that Congress wanted to refuse statehood to Wyoming as long as it allowed women to vote, whereas the legislature wired back to Washington: “We’ll stay out a thousand years rather than come in without our women.”

I’d love to believe Wyoming men were particularly sensitive – like the men of the 10 other Western states, including Arizona, where women had suffrage years before their sisters in the east – but the motivation wasn’t enlightenment as much as loneliness. As Clift notes, throughout the West, women were scarce and “frontiersmen were willing to do what it took to attract partners.” While that tells me the men of the West were practical, it also tells me that some women would do almost anything – including moving to godforsaken dirty towns with no law and order, no schools or churches or libraries, and move away from families and familiarities and even brave countless dangers – to live where their voice was welcome at the polling place. If that doesn’t say something special, nothing does. To me, it speaks volumes about how dismal the alternative was.

“When Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president in March 1913, a married woman was considered the property of her husband,” Clift writes. “Women couldn’t serve on juries, or in the event of divorce gain custody of their children. Women couldn’t travel alone comfortably. A lone woman staying in a hotel was considered ‘loose.’ It was radical thinking to propose that women participate in society directly as individuals rather than as an extension of their husbands or fathers. Opponents of suffrage predicted family life would collapse if women were allowed out of their preordained ‘sphere’ of house and home.”

Women who found that status suffocating were already weary of the fight by then – since Colonial times, women had decried their second-class citizenship. In 1776, Abigail Adams, writing to her husband and future president John, nailed it: “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” (Abigail was my kind of gal.)

In 1848, at the now-famous Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, the campaign for suffrage was officially launched – and those in attendance were almost giddy with the righteousness of their effort. Clift cites a great irony: The convention patterned its statement of rights after the Declaration of Independence that had been written 72 years earlier. “Little did they know that it would be another 72 years before their Declaration of Sentiments would be fulfilled.”

Nor could they have dreamed what would face them and their daughters over all those years. Or that so many women – to say nothing of the men – would oppose them. There was even a “Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association” founded by the wives of two popular Civil War commanders. They declared: “If women gain the vote, it upsets the natural order and sows ‘division and discord’ in the family unit and in the country,” Clift writes.

She also writes that beginning in 1866, women presented every session of Congress with petitions demanding the vote, and it wasn’t until 1878 that California Senator Aaron A. Sargent introduced a proposed 16th Amendment that was nicknamed the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment.” The press treated it with revulsion, and hotly criticized the uppity women who had invaded the Senate and had “the impertinence to buttonhole the senators on their way to lunch in a way that made them uncomfortable.”

Of course, votes for women did not become the 16th Amendment, or the 17th or the 18th. And the heart and soul of the effort wouldn’t live to see it enacted at all. When Susan Anthony died in 1906, several of the nation’s newspapers wrote the obituary on the movement, too. One editorial writer called Anthony “the champion of a lost cause,” while others predicted her “peculiar views” would now be forgotten.

But they hadn’t counted on a hellraiser named Alice Paul, who was such a major force in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (which became the League of Women Voters that is still such a potent force in democracy today).

Ms. Paul was, frankly, tired of the “diplomatic” approach her suffrage sisters had long pursued. She was especially put off by the long debate in the 1910 women’s convention over whether the delegates needed to apologize to President William Taft for hissing him when he told them: “If I could be sure that women as a class, including all the intelligent women, would exercise the franchise, I should be in favor of it. At present there is considerable doubt.”

When Woodrow Wilson was elected president, he knew from the day he arrived in Washington that suffragettes were going to be trouble.

On the eve of his inauguration in 1913, Paul organized a massive “March on Washington,” and for the first time in history, disrupted the seating of a new president.

Some 8,000 women formed the procession, and as Clift reports: “Washington had never seen anything on the magnitude of this procession. Women from countries where suffrage had been granted walked first. [In case you didn’t know, the United States was the last major nation to give women the right to vote.] Behind them came the ‘pioneers,’ women who agitated for the vote as youths and were now well past middle age. Then came sections of marchers, one after the other, honoring the work of women in society. There were nurses in uniforms, women farmers and factory workers, homemakers and librarians, college women in academic gowns….

Individual state delegations marched, followed by a separate section for male supporters [at least 25 states had male suffrage leagues], and, finally, in a shameful bow to Southern segregationist sentiments, at the very back of the parade, a contingent of black women. The New York Times called the event ‘one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.'”

And then there was the flip side that made this march such an important movement: The parade was marred with assaults on marchers – with police looking on. In fact, some newspapers reported that the police “seemed to enjoy and even participated in the ‘indecent epithets’ and ‘barnyard conversation’ hurled at the women.”

The New York Evening Journal ran a blaring headline: “Mob Hurts 300 Suffragists at Capital Parade!” Just as brutes everywhere eventually push too hard, the brutes who attacked the marchers did the movement a real favor – they helped turn public opinion.

“The marchers were mostly young women from respectable homes, and the spectacle of these fragile flowers of femininity, even if they were suffragists, being pushed and shoved by drunken men shouting obscenities proved too much for sedate Washington,” Clift writes. As the New York Tribune put it: “Capital Mobs Make Converts to Suffrage.”

Alice Paul knew they were on their way, and I’m glad she didn’t know they still had so far to go. She almost immediately met with the new president to press for his support, and got the time-honored political dodge – Wilson pretended not to know much about the issue, and besides, Congress was too busy with important work on tariffs and currency issues to take up votes for women. (The only promise she ever got out of Wilson was that he’d support a House Committee on Suffrage – and then he reneged on that, too.)

In 1913, as the Suffrage Movement was holding its 45th annual convention, Paul came up with a new strategy: Hold the party in power accountable. Since Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, the message from the convention was clear: Pass suffrage or we’ll work to defeat Democrats in the next election.

Paul would eventually break off and form a new, more radical group, to pursue those oaths (she called it the Woman’s Party), and she proved herself unflappable. She posted women with banners outside the White House every day for a year. When their presence most embarrassed the president, he ordered dozens of women – again and again – arrested and thrown in prison. Their crime was “obstructing traffic” as they stood on a public sidewalk. Paul herself was one of the most famous prisoners, staging a hunger strike that prison officials fought by force-feeding her through a tube stuffed into her nostril – three times a day for weeks.

President Wilson further infuriated suffragists when he entered World War I to fight off German aggression. “He was willing to go to war to defend the right of the German people to self-government, but he was keeping 20 million American women under his boot,” Clift writes. Suffragists under Paul’s direction took to calling him “Kaiser Wilson,” which struck a nerve, since anti-German sentiment was so strong that Clift recalls “sauerkraut was renamed ‘liberty cabbage’ and frankfurters became ‘hot dogs.'” Now, fighting for a woman’s right to vote was seen as anti-patriotic – and to Wilson, it was just a distraction from the war.

There was more sympathy, too, as the president continued having the suffrage picketers arrested – nearly 100 women were imprisoned at one time – and if news of their torture had not leaked out, this story might have had a very different ending.

“Damned suffrager!” one prison guard yelled as he tossed a woman into her cell, rendering her unconscious. “My mother ain’t no suffrager! I will put you through hell!”

News of the hell was smuggled out of prison, and the public outcry was deafening. Again, the mistreatment brought new supporters to the cause, and much of the country was now moved by the perseverance, strength and boldness of these women who had put their own lives on the line.

The House finally passed the suffrage amendment on January 10, 1918 – exactly 40 years to the day after it had been introduced in Congress and one year to the day after Paul first sent picketers to the White House gates with banners demanding the vote. But there was still the Senate to win, and by everyone’s count, the suffragists were 11 votes short.

On August 6, 1918, with the Senate about to recess for the summer, Paul staged yet another picket – this time in a park across from the White House. “Mr. President, how much longer must women wait for liberty?” their banner read.

One by one, they stepped forward to speak, and one by one, on orders of the White House, police grabbed each speaker and threw her into a paddy wagon. In all, 48 women were arrested, including Alice Paul. They were charged with climbing a statue and holding a meeting on public grounds. That began a revolving door of arrest-prison-release; arrest-prison-release. Some judges got tired of the charade and refused to even try new women arrested on such ridiculous charges.

Seeing elderly women led to jail was too much for some politicians – especially Republicans, who saw a chance to take Congress in the upcoming election if they supported suffrage. (The Senate Democrats were still giving nothing but lip service.) But the Senate defeated suffrage by one vote – thanks mainly to “no” votes from Democrats – prompting Paul to organize a railroad car called the “Prison Special.” The nationwide tour featured women who had been imprisoned, recounting their abuse and mistreatment. “These ‘prison specialists,’ outfitted in prison garb, spoke to packed houses everywhere, winning friends for suffrage and arousing thousands, especially in the South, to condemn the administration’s shameful treatment of women and to bombard the White House with cables of dismay,” Clift writes.

One thing you can say for Alice Paul – she knew her politics. Democrats lost both houses of Congress to Republicans, and suffrage was one of the major reasons.

When the GOP-led Senate finally passed the suffrage amendment – the final action before sending it to the states for ratification – “it could not have been more anticlimactic,” Clift writes. It was June 4, 1919. One suffragist would remember: “There was no excitement.”

So now attention shifted to the states. At that moment, the Western states – except for New Mexico – were fully franchised. In all, 15 of the 48 states had full suffrage, while 13 others allowed women to vote only in presidential elections. (The president-only vote had been the brainchild of longtime suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt.) Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois all ratified the 19th Amendment within days; Alabama was the first state to defeat it, quickly followed by Georgia. A year later, 35 states had ratified – one short of giving all American women the right to vote in any election.

The final fight came down to Tennessee, and specifically, to a 24-year-old lawmaker named Harry Burn, who had previously voted against suffrage. But at the last moment, his mother appealed to him. Clift recounts the message of Febb Emsinger Burn to her son: “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt…. Don’t forget to be a good boy…. Your Mother.” Henry remembered to be a good boy and changed history.

The 19th Amendment was officially added to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920 – it was signed by President Wilson’s secretary of state without ceremony in the wee hours of the morning, while Mrs. Catt was railroading to Washington, hoping to be there at the historic moment. While some newspapers said it was an inspired diplomatic move to sign it without fanfare, I have always thought it was just a way for Wilson to inflict his last wound to the women who’d caused him such grief.

Clift completes her compelling book with thoughts that make me feel ill: “Almost as soon as women got the vote, they took it for granted. It was as though the decades of struggle had never happened.”

I figured it had to be her when she came in the library at the National Women’s Party headquarters on Capitol Hill in 1970. After all, Alice Paul – the last living suffragist – lived upstairs in the stately Victorian with real Louis the 14th furniture. I’d come to Washington in the midst of the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment to study the women’s movement since suffrage for a graduate school project.

I hadn’t expected to meet her, only to use her incredible library – then the best source of suffrage literature to be found anywhere. But I had been told that while she naturally supported the ERA, Ms. Paul was an ardent opponent of any time limit on its ratification – a compromise the few women then in Congress were willing to make in order to get the amendment sent to the states.

Alice Paul walked into the library and sat down – I reached for my pen and notebook, and she shooed me off, telling me to listen, not take notes. She insisted that putting a time limit on ratification would kill the ERA – that it was just a ploy by opponents – and she was so right. She wasn’t interested in talking about her struggles for the vote, but was interested in what I had to offer.

“What have you done for women?” she asked me with direct frankness.

I stared at this remarkable, historical, brave woman who had done so much, and felt like a complete idiot. “Well, nothing,” I admitted. “Then go do something,” she demanded.

All these years later, I’m still trying.

Here’s my latest attempt: Please, vote on November 2.

And watch for me at the polls. I’ll be wearing yellow and purple.