Women’s Milestone Prompts Reflection : Activism: Modern-day suffragists take stock of advances made since women got the vote in 1920 and sound a battle cry in the continuing fight for equality.

Seventy years after women gained the right to vote, Ventura County women’s activists gathered Sunday to retrace their steps and plot their future course.

Political candidates such as 36th Assembly District hopeful Ginny Connell gave a call to arms to the members of the Ventura County Women’s Coalition for Equity and Choice. Connell said that women’s salaries and health benefits are still less than men’s, and she urged support of the abortion-rights movement.

And Chairwoman Lauren Anderson said in an interview that the coalition’s recent decision to support abortion rights has cost it members but has given it strength against a conservative trend that is weakening American women’s commitment to equality.

The ghosts of activists past spoke to the group through modern-day activists who wore antique costumes. They told of prison hunger strikes and White House pickets, and of the ridicule and harassment that women endured on the road to equal voting rights.

They reminded the three dozen coalition members gathered at the Poinsettia Pavilion in Ventura how far women have come in the 70 years since ratification of the 19th Amendment, and how far they have yet to go.

Karen Normington played Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902). Wrapped in a black lace shawl and white bonnet, she described her origins as a “troublemaker,” the daughter of a Johnstown, N.Y., lawyer who once incensed his daughter by telling her that women had no property rights under the law.

“I looked for a pair of scissors immediately,” the Stanton stand-in confided to the crowd. “I was going to cut that out of the lawbooks. But my father told me the process was a little more complicated than that.”

Normington then told how Stanton advanced women’s rights through small gestures--such as wearing frilly pants-like leggings called “bloomers”--and large contributions--such as her work with Susan B. Anthony in co-founding the National Suffrage Assn. in 1869.

Next, Gwyneth Stockwell took the podium as Anthony, the thin, austere spinster who took the women’s movement closer to the goal of equal voting rights before her death in 1906. Stockwell told of Anthony’s early work in the anti-drinking movement and of the 1852 temperance conference in Syracuse, where women delegates were not allowed to speak, which prodded Anthony to turn her energies toward women’s rights.

Anthony illegally cast a vote in 1872, for which she was arrested, tried and fined $100; but, Stockwell lamented, authorities did not further prosecute Anthony for failing to pay the fine, thus denying her an ongoing case that she so fervently hoped would land the women’s rights question before the Supreme Court.

And in the year of her death, Stockwell said, Anthony gave the rallying cry at a women’s rights convention in Baltimore that was to become the suffragists’ motto: “Failure is impossible.”

Finally, Deanna Hackman strode to the podium as Alice Paul, who dictated the fashion and political tenor that unified the women’s rights movement into the single voice that persuaded Congress to approve the 19th Amendment.

Clad in the bright white dress and gold-and-purple sash reading “VOTES FOR WOMEN” that became the suffragists’ uniform, Hackman told of suffrage marches that led to a year-and-a-half-long picket of the White House to protest President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal in 1916 to support women’s rights.

“Mobs started attacking pickets, women were dragged along the pavement,” she said in horror. “I was arrested and put in prison for seven months.”

After a hunger strike, during which she was force-fed by prison staff, Paul was released. When the Senate failed to pass the House-approved Anthony amendment in 1918, Paul organized a picket of the Senate, eventually burning copies of Wilson’s speeches about democracy--a gesture that seemed finally to get his attention.

On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was signed into law.

“Today, this planet is sick. Today, Mother Earth is calling out for your help,” Hackman told the group. “And I ask you: What will you do now with your suffrage?”