Credited with revitalizing the movement for women's suffrage, Alice Paul (1885-1977) mobilizeda generation of women who had grown impatient with the incremental measures being takentoward gaining the vote. Paul helped to found the Congressional Union (later the National Woman's Party) and led a movement dedicated to the passageof a constitutional amendment for women's suffrage.Her tactics led to the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919.

Paul was born in Moorestown, New Jersey on January 11, 1885, just five years before the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Though her vision of women's rights was never as comprehensive as that of Stanton, Paul always remained committed to women's freedom. The oldest of four children, Paul grew up in a family committed to social justice. Her parents, William M. Paul, a businessman and president of the Burlington County Trust Company, and Tacie Parry, belonged to the Society of Friends and instilled in Paul the Quaker values of discipline, service, honesty, and equality between the sexes. Paul's forbears also included, on her mother's side, the Quaker leader William Penn, who advocated religious tolerance, and on her father's side, the Winthrops of Massachusetts. Her mother, one of the first women to attend Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, took her daughter to her first suffrage meeting when she was just a child.

When Paul was 16, her father died suddenly of pneumonia. The family, though financially secure, accepted the guidance and authority of a male relative, whose conservative views created some tension in the household. Paul, who had attended a Quaker school in Moorestown, left home to attend Swarthmore College where she studied biology because, according to Christine A. Lunardini in From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party: 1910-1928, "it was something about which she knew nothing." She discovered politics and economics in her senior year. Professor Robert Brooks recommended her for a College Settlement Association fellowship at the New York School of Philanthropy. When she graduated from Swarthmore in 1905, Paul spent a year there studying social work. She later earned a master's degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and became interested in the problems raised by women's inferior legal status. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1912 from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the legal status of women, a law degree in 1922 from Washington College of Law, and a second Ph.D. in law in 1928 from American University.

Seeds of Militancy

Paul's shift from social work to law reflected a more profound shift in her political sensibilities. In the fall of 1907, Paul interrupted her studies at the University of Pennsylvania to accept a fellowship in social work at the Quaker training school in Woodbridge, England. While she was studying at the University of Birmingham, Christabel Pankhurst, the daughter of the famous British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, was prevented from addressing a university audience there by a hostile crowd. Paul had never before witnessed outright opposition to the suffrage cause, and was shocked. The event radicalized her. On the invitation of the Charity Organization Society of London, she became a caseworker in Dalston and attended her first suffrage parade there in 1908. For the next two years, she worked closely with the Women's Social and Political Union, participating in the more militant strategies of British feminism: demonstrations, imprisonment, and hunger strikes.

The National Association of Woman Suffrage Association

Paul left England after a brief incarceration at Halloway Prison for her suffrage activities and returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1910. She resumed her studies, but with a new determination to change the legal status of women. At the NAWSA convention in 1910, Paul lectured on "The English Situation" in an attempt to bring the new militancy across the Atlantic. NAWSA resisted Paul's commitment to direct action, but a younger generation of activists found Paul's new optimism captivating. In 1913, she and Lucy Burns, a graduate of Vassar College whom she had first met in a police station in London, assumed leadership of NAWSA's Congressional Committee and began a campaign for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women across the nation.

For a federal campaign to succeed, Paul believed, it needed to have the support of the president. Paul selected March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, for a massive suffrage parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. Not only would the suffragists gain important publicity for their cause, they would also inform the president that they were willing to hold the party in power responsible for women's enfranchisement. Over 8,000 marchers participated; over a half million people gathered along the parade route. When President Wilson arrived at the train station that afternoon, few were there to greet him; instead they had gone to Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the suffrage parade. Though Paul had done her part to organize an ordered and peaceful march, an unruly crowd assaulted the suffragists while police stood by and did nothing. The near-riot resulted in a special Senate investigation that resulted in the removal of the superintendent of police. A few days after the parade, a Congressional committee sent a delegation to the White House to meet with the president, who politely asked for more time to consider the matter of women's suffrage. Nevertheless, Paul's first major organizing effort had met with some success.

National Woman's Party

Despite the success of the suffrage parade, Paul encountered increasing resistance from NAWSA over the next several months. NAWSA members feared that Paul's political strategy of holding the Democratic Party responsible for enfranchisement would upset the tentative gains they had made at the state level. In addition, NAWSA had never really embraced Paul's vision of a constitutional amendment. By the summer of 1914, after a divisive struggle within NAWSA, Paul and Burns left to form a newly independent Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, later renamed the National Woman's Party (NWP). By 1916, the struggle for women's suffrage had shifted to the federal level and Paul's militant tactics, which included picketing the White House, required a group of enthusiastic and dedicated suffragists. The members of NWP were mostly white, middle-class, enfranchised women who were willing to risk respectability, comfort, and even freedom to extend the franchise nationally. For the next two years, many members of NWP, including Paul, endured harassment, imprisonment, forced feedings, and threats, but continued to pursue the goal of a constitutional amendment with dogged determination.

White House Pickets

In January 1917, the NWP stationed members in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. On the eve of America's involvement in the First World War, the tactic was confrontational and audacious; the NWP was the first group ever to picket the White House. Opponents would argue that it bordered on treason. For Paul, whose single-mindedness about women's equality had never wavered, America's involvement in a war for democracy had no moral ground if the nation refused to grant all of its citizens the right to vote. The NWP picketed the White House for 18 months. Thousands of local women, unaffiliated with the NWP, volunteered for the picket lines. While the public initially supported the picketers, by April 1917 Wilson had declared war and support plummeted. The threat of arrest became imminent.

In June, NWP members Lucy Burns and Katherine Morey were arrested by district police, charged with obstruction of traffic, and released. Twenty-seven more women were arrested over the next several weeks. Soon, heavier sentences were handed down and 16 women were required to serve 60 days at Occoquan Workhouse, in Virginia. By September, the House voted to establish a House Committee on Woman Suffrage, and for the first time both branches of Congress had standing committees to consider the question of enfranchisement for women. Picketers were bolstered by the news and more women continued to risk arrest and imprisonment. Conditions at Occoquan differed little from conditions at most prisons in the early part of the twentieth century. Cells were small, dark, and unsanitary. Food was infested with mealworms. Prisoners were routinely harassed and intimidated. Soon, however, it became apparent that the suffragists, and especially their leaders, were being singled out by authorities frustrated by the picketers' tenacity.

In October, Paul was arrested on the picket line and sent to Occoquan. By the end of the month, she and fellow suffragist Rose Winslow began a hunger strike in order to secure their rights as political prisoners. Over the next three weeks, three times each day, Paul and Winslow were force fed; tubes were pushed into their noses and down their throats. In addition, Paul was moved to a psychiatric ward where she was monitored day and night by an attendant holding a flashlight up to her face. Lunardini notes that "prison psychiatrists interviewed her on several occasions and it was made clear to her that one signature on an admission form was all that was necessary to have her committed to an insane asylum."

By November 1917, the ordeal was over and the women were released from prison. President Wilson, who was wearied by the tactics of the NWP, announced his support for the suffrage amendment in January 1918. When the Senate refused to pass the bill, Paul once again resumed her picket campaign. When 48 suffragists were arrested, a public outcry prompted the women's release.

Victory

By 1919, the amendment had passed both houses. Paul, however, continued to lobby until it was ratified in 1920. The passage of the 19th Amendment, for so long the focus of Paul's efforts, prompted the NWP to reconsider its political goals. Though she gave up leadership of the NWP after 1920, Paul's ideas still dominated. She drafted an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was introduced in Congress in 1923. Her notion that "men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States," was a controversial one. Many feminists worried that it would invalidate labor laws that protected women in the workplace, but Paul continued to insist on the simple principle of equality instilled in her by her Quaker upbringing.

Paul continued to struggle for women's equal rights throughout the middle decades of the 20th century. During World War II, when the war effort required a temporary suspension of protective labor laws, the ERA was revived once again, endorsed by both parties, and debated in Congress. In the 1950s, Paul lobbied Congress to include sex discrimination among the equal protections advanced by the Civil Rights bill and succeeded in securing equal rights for women in employment in 1964.

Paul died on July 9, 1977 in Moorestown, New Jersey, convinced that organizers would be successful in securing the three states needed to ratify the ERA. The amendment, however, was defeated, ending the movement to provide women with a constitutional right to equal justice. Often rigid and conservative, Paul never embraced a broad social platform for women's rights. But her single-minded devotion to legal equality shaped the feminist movement over much of the twentieth century.

Further Reading

American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and March C. Carnes, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Encyclopedia of American Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Jerome L. Sternstein, Harper Collins, 1996.

Lunardini, Christine A., From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights:Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910-1928, New York University Press, 1986.

Reader's Companion to American History, edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

(1885-1977), feminist and suffragist. Born into a Quaker family in Moorestown, New Jersey, Paul was raised in an intellectual and religious environment. Her forebears included on her mother's side William Penn and on her father's side the Winthrops of Massachusetts; her maternal grandfather was one of the founders of Swarthmore College. Paul graduated from Swarthmore in 1905 and then attended the New York School of Philanthropy (later Columbia University School of Social Work), the University of Pennsylvania, and a training school for Quakers in Woodbridge, England. She remained in England from 1907 to 1910.

It was during those years that Paul, while studying and working as a case worker for a London settlement house, served her apprenticeship for what became her vocation: the struggle for women's rights. She was enlisted by England's militant suffragists Emmeline and Christobel Pankhurst. Her education as an activist was acquired through a series of arrests, imprisonments, hunger strikes, and forced feedings. She learned how to generate publicity for the cause and how to capitalize on that publicity.

Paul enrolled again at the University of Pennsylvania on her return to the United States in 1910. There she earned a Ph.D. in sociology and began to situate herself in the American suffrage movement. In 1912 she launched her full-time suffrage career. Working first within the National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa), Paul gathered about her a group of young women, many of whom had also worked with the Pankhursts in England and who were willing to depart from the association's conservative tactics.

Paul broke with the nawsa in 1914 and cofounded the Congressional Union, dedicated to seeking a federal constitutional amendment for woman suffrage. In 1916, she founded the National Woman's party. She led pickets at the White House and Congress and despite America's entry into World War I refused to abandon these tactics. She and her colleagues were arrested and imprisoned; they engaged in hunger strikes and endured forced feedings at the hands of authorities. Ultimately her tactics, as well as persuasion from Carrie Chapman Catt, induced President Woodrow Wilson to make a federal suffrage amendment a war measures priority, a stand he had previously refused to take. Paul was a pivotal force in the passage and ratification in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment.

In 1923, Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Overcoming the opposition of women's organizations who feared the loss of protective legislation, she helped gain acceptance of an era plank in the platforms of both major political parties in 1944. She continued to work actively out of the National Woman's party headquarters in Washington, D.C., until failing health forced her to relocate to the Connecticut countryside in 1972. Even then she continued to provide inspiration to new generations of women's rights activists until her death in 1977.

Throughout her life, Alice Paul remained personally conservative and professionally demanding of both herself and her colleagues. She did not relinquish power readily nor could she be easily persuaded to depart from the methods and tactics she had learned from the Pankhursts in England. But her vision for women always transcended her conservatism and rigidity. "I think if we get freedom for women, then they are probably going to do a lot of things that I wish they wouldn't do," she said shortly before her death. "But it seems to me that isn't our business to say what they should do with it. It is our business to see that they get it."

Bibliography:

Inez Haynes Irwin, Up Hill with Banners Flying (1964); Christine A. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910-1928 (1986); Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (1920).

Author:

Christine A. Lunardini

See also Feminist Movement; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman's Party; Suffrage.

1885–1977, American feminist, b. Moorestown, N.J. She helped found the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (1913), which became the National Woman's party (1917). After the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, she worked for passage of an equal rights amendment. See also woman suffrage.

An American feminist and suffragist of the early twentieth century; she founded the National Woman's Party in 1916 and led protests at the White House and before Congress on behalf of women's rights. Her tactics led to her imprisonment but also contributed to President Woodrow Wilson's decision to make an amendment giving women the right to vote a priority. In 1923 she proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution but encountered opposition from various groups, including women's organizations, which feared the loss of protective legislations if the amendment were ratified. Although the ERA has continued to be proposed, it has never been ratified.

Alice Stokes Paul was a militant U.S. suffrage leader who is best remembered as the author in 1923 of the equal rights amendment. Paul, who for decades played a major role in the National Woman's Party, also successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a ban against sex discrimination in title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. §2000e et seq.).

Paul was born on January 11, 1885, in Moorestown, New Jersey. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905 and then went to England to do graduate work. While in England, Paul became involved with the British suffragettes and received three jail sentences for participating in militant actions. She returned to the United States in 1910 and continued her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned a Ph.D. degree in social work in 1912.

In 1913 Paul formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which later became the National Woman's Party (NWP). She advocated a more militant position to publicize the need for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Paul organized marches, rallies, and protests outside the White House. As in England, she was jailed three times for organizing and participating in suffrage protests. While in jail she waged hunger strikes, resulting in her hospitalization where she was force-fed.

With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, which gave women the vote, Paul shifted her focus to the legal inequality of women. In 1923 she wrote the equal rights amendment, which she called the Lucretia Mott amendment, in honor of the nineteenth-century feminist leader. The proposed amendment stated that "[e]quality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" and that "the Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." Paul's proposed amendment was introduced to Congress in 1923, but it would not be approved until March 1972. However, the amendment failed to be ratified by the thirty-eight states required under the Constitution.

Paul continued to lead the NWP, and in 1938 she organized the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, known as the World Woman's Party. She played a key role in seeing that the preamble to the United Nations Charter included references to sex equality. During the debates over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Paul and the NWP helped lobby for the inclusion of sex discrimination as illegal conduct.

Paul died on July 9, 1977, in Moorestown, New Jersey.

Quotes:

"When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row."

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