Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Committee honors Helen Thomas

By Bobbie Brinegar on 05/31/2010 @ 06:55 PM

Recently I was among the guests at a reception to honor the dean of the White House Press Corps, Helen Thomas, and to unveil the ambitious architectural plan  that will pay tribute to the suffragists who were jailed at the Lorton Work House.

Helen drew laughter when she began her remarks saying, “The first 90 years are the hardest,” and then sharing that her 90th birthday is on August 4, 2010, just weeks before the 90th anniversary of when women got the vote on August 26.

The second annual Silent Sentinel Award recognized Helen Thomas’s unmatched contributions to our national life. Like the suffragists, her spirit is indomitable and her life filled with substantial “firsts” which paved the way for every female journalist who followed.

Eleanor Clift joined Helen Thomas for this special event -- it was Helen who originally encouraged Eleanor to write a book chronicling the seventy two year long struggle for women to win the vote. A few remarkable quotations from Eleanor’s book, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment:

How public opinion was molded and then mobilized to pass the Nineteenth Amendment to ensure women the right to vote is the model for the other major social movements of the twentieth century.

The Founding Sisters engineered the greatest expansion of democracy on a single day that the world has ever seen, and yet suffrage faded from public memory almost as soon as it happens.

In 2020 America will celebrate 100 years of the enfranchisement of women. At long last a memorial honoring the Founding Sisters is on the horizon. The inspiring Turning Point Suffragist Memorial is to be located in Occoquan Park, Virginia. The occasion raised $22,000, a first step toward the fundraising goal.

If you would like to join in this opportunity to keep our sisters role in history alive, please visit the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial website.

For more on Helen Thomas, visit her website.

*The HBO film Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank and Anjelica Houston, tells the story of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns and many other women who played a role at the turning point in the fight for woman’s suffrage.

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