Ladies: No matter how you politically align yourself - no matter what your personal belief system, if you are considering not voting this fall in the presidential election, I ask you to read on.

The United States of America has been around for more than 230 years. It is only during the past 88 years that women have had the right to vote. If it had not been for the brave actions of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers in the early 1900s, who knows when women would have been included in our democracy.

On Nov. 15, 1917, women who had picketed the Woodrow Wilson White House, carrying signs asking for the vote, were thrown into the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. For weeks they suffered unbelievable conditions and torture at the hands of the guards. Their food was slop, infested with worms; their only water came from an open pail; they were beaten with clubs by the prison guards for "obstructing sidewalk traffic." One of the protesters, Lucy Burns, was beaten, chained by her hands to the cell bars above her head and left hanging there all night. When Alice Paul embarked on a hunger strike, she was tied to a chair and force fed through a tube until she vomited. This went on for weeks until news was leaked to the press. Affidavits described how the guards grabbed, dragged, beat, choked and kicked the women. Remember this was America and less than three generations ago.

The point is simple. If you are considering not voting because of you have to take care of the kids, your job, it's raining or you think your vote doesn't matter, I want you to think about your grandmothers and great-grandmothers who literally put their lives on the line so women could go to the polls and vote.

Voting is not an inconvenience, it is a hard-fought-for privilege.

I couldn't wait to register when I was old enough to vote and have voted in every election since. I challenge all of you to do the same.

One last thought. There are many "rights" we have today that we take for granted - they've always been there in our lifetime and we think they always will. Recent history has shown that this is not necessarily true. If you are still considering not voting, please take a moment to think about what our foremothers went through to win that right for their daughters and granddaughters. They exhibited unspeakable courage. We should all honor their courage by becoming knowledgeable about the candidates and the issues and exercising that right.

If you want to find out more about this fight, there is an HBO movie you can view, "Iron Jawed Angels," and Web sites you can visit: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/tactics.html and http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

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Sharon DelaBarre is owner of DelaBarre & Associates, Inc. and BaRay Event Services, Inc. and a Sequim resident.