Today is Supreme Sacrifice Day.  This is the day to recognize those people who have offered themselves for the welfare of others.  In conjunction with Women’s History Month, the focus of today’s blog is on Sister Dorothy Stang, and activists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.

Sister Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame, was an environmentalist and human rights worker who advocated for the rights of the poor and to preserve the Amazon rainforest.  Despite numerous threats to her life from loggers and criminal gangs, she worked for almost 40 years to support poor farmers’ rights to their small plots of land and for the extraction of forest products without deforestation.

On the morning of February 12, 2005, Sister Dorothy was walking to a community meeting to discuss the rights for the Amazon.  She was confronted on the road by two men.  When they asked if she had any weapons, she replied, only her bible.  Sister Dorothy began to read to them from the bible, when she was shot six times and killed.

Although Sister Dorothy was silenced, her work continues in the Amazon by Sisters and others who teach that all have rights and strive to maintain the well-being of the Amazon.

Visit the Library to learn more about Sister Dorothy Stang.  Besides books, check out our dvd collection and watch The Student, the Nun and the Amazon (SD414.B6 S78 2005).

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were American suffragists who risked their lives in their fight for equal rights for women.  Together and with other members of the National Women’s Party (NWP), they successfully led a campaign that resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.  From that point on, neither the federal government, nor any states, could deny anyone the right to vote based on the person’s gender.

What differentiated Paul and Burns and the NWP from other suffragists is that they fought for equal rights on a national level as opposed to other groups that fought on the individual state levels.

In 1916 the women of the NWP directed their attention to President Woodrow Wilson asking him to give women the right to vote and picketed outside the White House.  However, when the war started, many, including President Wilson, viewed the actions of picketing a wartime president as unpatriotic.  The women were attacked by angry mobs, arrested and thrown in jail.  Their treatment was often brutal.  The suffragists, including older and frail women, were beaten and kept in unsanitary and rat-invested cells.  While staging hunger strikes, Paul, Burns and others were physically restrained, and when they refused to open their mouths, tubes were shoved up their nostrils.

News of the women’s plight in prison became available to the public, which resulted in the public, the press and some politicians demanding their release as well as their support  of women’s suffrage.  In 1917, President Wilson, in response to public outcry, reversed his decision and supported the suffrage movement.  The work of Paul, Burns and the NWP continued upon their release and finally in 1920, women gained the right to vote. 

Borrow the dvd Iron Jawed Angels (PN1997.2.I76 2004) to watch the sacrifices and hard work of suffragists Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the NWP, fight for women’s right to vote.