Alice Paul 1885 - 1977

"There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it."

How did a young Quaker girl from a small town in New Jersey become a major force in the women's movement?  Alice Paul was born in Mount Laurel, New Jersey on January 11, 1885.  She was both well-educated and socially active.  As an undergraduate, she attended Swarthmore College, later worked at New York College Settlement while attending the New York School of Social Work, studied in England for three years while taking part in the settlement house movement there, and later received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  After she received her doctorate, she joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and within a year became the chairwoman of the Congressional Committee of that organization.  In 1913 Alice Paul and her followers split from NAWSA, whose leaders disapproved of the radical tactics she had learned and practiced while taking part in the women's movement in England.

As head of the new Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, Paul organized protests and rallies, including the famous 1913 parade that was held the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguarion., In 1917 the CU became the National Woman's Party, and began picketing the White House every day; these protesters stood silently at the gates of the White House holding signs asking the question that Inez Milholland had asked just before she collapsed at a rally in Los Angeles: "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?"   At first the women were ignored, but after the United States' entry into World War I, their signs began to taunt Wilson for his hypocrisy in sending men to fight and die for democracy in foreign lands  while denying women equal rights at home.

After a while these protests became embarrassing to the president and officials wanted the picketing to stop.  Picketers began to be assaulted both verbally and physically while the police looked on and did nothing to stop the assaults.  Then the picketers statrted to be arrested for obstructing traffic.  At first those arrested had the charges against them dropped; then they began to be sentenced to short jail terms; then they were sentenced to longer jail terms.  Finally Alice Paul herself was arrested and sentenced to seven months in prison.  She was placed in solitary confinement for two weeks and fed only bread and water.  When she was released from solitary, she was so weak that she was taken to the prison hospital where she went on a hunger strike.  For this, she was placed in the psychiatric ward in the prison hospital and threatened with being placed in an insane asylum, but she continued her hunger strike.  Despite being force fed with tubes down her throat three time a day, she refused to give up.  She was freed after five week.  By this time, the newspapers were carrying stories about the jail terms and the force feedings, and the American public began to be angry.  Support for the suffragettes grew.

On January 9, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced his support for woman suffrage.  The next day, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.  It took the Senate more than a year to pass it, but they finally did on June 4, 1919; the amendment passed by one vote.  Then the process of ratification began.  On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it law.  After the passage of the 19th Amendment, the National Womans' Party realized its work was not yet complete, so in 1923, Alice Paul became the first to propose an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.  It was proposed in every Congressional session until it finally passed in 1970.  However, it fell just short of enough states to ratify it, so it remains merely a proposed amendment.

Alice Paul remained a social  activist at heart.  Before World War II she was involved in the peace movement, observing that if women had helped to end World War I, then World War II wouldn't have happened.  And even though she did not succeed in getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed in the United States, she did see that equal rights was affirmed in the preamble to the United Nations Charter.  She was also instrumental in seeing that there was gender equality in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  By the time she died in Moorestown, New Jersey on July 9, 1977, a new generation of women was becoming acquainted with her contributions to the women's movement.

Crystal Eastman said about Alice Paul: History has known dedicated souls from the beginning, men and women whose every waking moment is devoted to an impersonal end, leaders of a "cause" who are ready at any moment quite simply to die for it. But is it rare to find in one human being this passion for service and sacrifice combined first with the shrewd calculating mind of a born political leader, and second with the ruthless driving force, sure judgment and phenomenal grasp of detail that characterize a great entrepreneur.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality. Alice Paul

Suffragists oral history project

Audio excerpts from Alice Paul's oral history interview