Alice Paul

Suffrage Leader

• Born: January 11, 1885
• Birthplace: Moorestown, New Jersey
• Died: July 9, 1977
• Place of death: Moorestown, New Jersey

American suffragist

The leader of the radical wing of the woman suffrage movement that helped ensure the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Paul also introduced the Equal Rights Amendment.

Areas of achievement Women’s rights, government and politics

Early Life

Born to a wealthy Quaker (Society of Friends) family, Alice Paul entered the women’s movement at a very early age. Her father, William Paul, served as president of the Burlington County Trust Company, and her mother, Tacie Parry Paul, was clerk of the Moorestown Friends’ Meeting. Both strongly encouraged young Alice’s interest in equal rights.

Paul’s early life focused almost entirely on her Quaker heritage. The Friends created a humane, optimistic religion during the seventeenth century, and they were one of the few sects that preached equality between the sexes. The fact that the Quakers allowed women to become missionaries and ministers created a unique religious environment. Although not much is known about Paul’s childhood, many scholars agree that it was the egalitarian, flexible, and tolerant nature of Quaker society that allowed her to develop as perhaps America’s greatest radical feminist.

Although both of Paul’s parents encouraged her independent attitudes, her mother served as her chief mentor. Her father died before she reached adulthood. Tacie Paul was one of many Quaker women (such as Lucretia Mott) who were involved in the nineteenth century American woman suffrage movement.

Paul followed in her mother’s footsteps, enrolling in the Moorestown Quaker school and later graduating from another Friends’ institution, Swarthmore College. During these formative years, She also used Lucretia Mott as her role model. Mott, one of the founders of the American woman suffrage movement, helped organize the first women’s rights convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments. Paul began her great crusade for equal rights as a graduate student at England’s Woodbridge Quaker College and the London School of Economics, where she joined Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia Pankhurst, the radical British feminists who taught her the aggressive tactics that later produced American congressional support for the Nineteenth Amendment.

During Paul’s years in Britain, she formed a close, lifelong friendship with another American suffragist, Lucy Burns, who also belonged to the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union. Nearing the end of this political apprenticeship, Paul resolved to bring confrontational feminism to the United States.

Life’s Work

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910, she found Susan B. Anthony’s bill granting women the right to vote still stalled in a congressional committee. Even though Anthony had submitted her bill in 1896, American women still lacked “The Franchise.” Paul concluded that the situation in America called for drastic measures.

Paul persuaded the National-American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to allow her to coordinate its lobbying effects in Congress and promptly organized a huge march on the White House backed by a suffrage army estimated at a half-million people. Her dramatic entrance into Washington politics duly impressed the new president, Woodrow Wilson, whose inauguration occurred the next day. Immediately after the opening of the new Congress, Paul employed her aggressive tactics on the returning politicians to secure the Anthony Bill’s release from committee to the floor of the House of Representatives. It would have been an overwhelming task for any lobbyist. Given Paul’s extreme shyness, introverted Quaker personality, and lack of rhetorical skills, the bill that Congress passed, the president signed, and the states ratified became a signal triumph for her organizational genius.

During World War I, Paul quickly became the radical leader of the feminist movement. First, she changed NAWSA’s lobbying focus from the states to the national legislature. She became a public relations expert at a time in history when such experts were rare. Paul’s training in British circles enabled her to overcome opposition from the Washington, D.C., police, who wanted her marchers to parade on Sixteenth Street in front of the foreign embassies (instead of picketing the White House). She stood her ground, insisting that the ladies must be seen by the president and First Lady. She won the debate the first of many such victories resulting in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

In 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and President Wilson declared that the “world must be made safe for democracy,” Paul decided that the time was right for another parade and picketing of the White House. “Why should American women support the war to make the world safe for democracy,” her pickets emphatically asked, “when they have no democracy since they cannot vote?” When the White House called the police, Paul and her loyal “soldiers,” facing arrest and imprisonment, followed tactics learned in England and refused to eat. Force-fed by law enforcement officials afraid of the possible public outcry produced by the hospitalization or death of a suffragist, Paul turned that tactic as well to the advantage of her cause.

Not everyone in the suffrage movement approved of Paul’s tactics. More radical than the mainstream NAWSA’s moderate leadership, she organized the National Woman’s Party in 1913. The Quaker activist incorporated the party on September 20, 1918, but kept it largely inactive until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment became a certainty.

After the Congress and the states approved woman suffrage, Paul reactivated the National Woman’s Party in 1921. Although most women perhaps believed that equal rights would result automatically from the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Paul and her colleagues remained unconvinced.

The principal philosophical ideas Paul wrote into the National Woman’s Party platform reflected her skepticism that voting rights would lead to equal rights. Women, she argued, would no longer constitute the “governed half” of the American people. In the future, they would participate equally in all aspects of life.

The National Woman’s Party organized most of the serious agitation such as jail-ins, marches, fasts, and picketing that occurred before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. When ratification occurred, the more moderate NAWSA transformed itself into the League of Women Voters. Paul, however, believed that the battle would not be over until equal rights had been achieved for all Americans, regardless of sex.

For Paul, true freedom extended far beyond the simple attainment of suffrage. She single-mindedly pursued the goal of removing all legal obstacles for women throughout the United States. After careful consideration and examination of the tactics and strategies that won the battle for woman suffrage, she concluded that the only means to legal equality was the passage of a federal Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This was an extremely radical idea when Paul introduced it in 1923 at Seneca Falls, New York, where the first women’s rights convention had been held in 1848. The central point she expressed focused on the philosophy that women would never be subjugated again “in law or in custom, but shall in every way be on an equal plane in rights.” In this way, her Woman’s Party gave birth to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Paul’s proposed amendment split the women’s movement. Some women believed that voting rights naturally would produce equality, making a second amendment unnecessary. Since the ERA radically redefined power relationships between men and women, even stronger opposition than originally existed to the Nineteenth Amendment developed within the male establishment.

Critics dismissed Paul as either a harmless but misguided “bleeding heart liberal” or a dangerously deranged radical. Democrats and Republicans alike warned the public against being receptive to her ideas. As the nation turned more conservative during the 1920’s, with the election of President Warren Harding and the widespread repudiation of progressivism, the popularity of Paul and her party declined, and she did not resurface as a significant force until the reintroduction of the ERA in 1972.

Following Paul’s creation of the National Woman’s Party and the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment, the popularity of women’s rights declined in the United States during the Depression of the 1930’s. As the fight for jobs excluded more and more American women, Paul took her campaign to Europe, where she founded the World’s Woman’s Party. Since Paul always expressed strong opposition to the League of Nations’ failure to allow female political participation, she continued her lobbying efforts on behalf of women until the organization collapsed during World War II. When the League gave way to the United Nations, Paul played a key role in introducing an equal rights provision in the preamble to the U.N. charter.

Following Paul’s European experiment, she returned to the United States, where she resumed her efforts to pass the new, revamped Equal Rights Amendment. During the late 1960’s, Paul campaigned against the Vietnam War while working for the ERA. Still marching and fighting for equal rights at the age of eighty-five, she finally surrendered to old age and moved to a Quaker nursing home in her native Moorestown, New Jersey, where America’s great radical feminist died on July 9, 1977, at the age of ninety-two. She never lived to see the passage of the amendment to which she had devoted her entire life.

Significance

Few leaders in the politics of women’s liberation were more significant than Alice Paul. Her longevity and radical proclivities outdistanced others who garnered more press and historical notice. For sixty-five years, from 1912 until her death in 1977, Paul stood ready to give her best to the cause of equal rights.

Despite her reputation for radical measures, Paul was not an abrasive personality. Although some thought her insensitive, perhaps what they perceived was the absent-mindedness of an intellectual who received her Ph.D. in sociology in 1912, before she launched her suffrage career. She understood both the politics and the economics of equal rights. The real struggle, she once argued, would not be won in state or even national legislatures. Women would have to win economically before they could win politically. Political forms would crystallize, she hypothesized, only when women had gained economic power. More important, she emphasized that having money was not enough. Knowing how to use money to attain political ends was the key.

Paul was not as well known as other feminists Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her strategies and tactics, however, have since been considered to have been paramount in obtaining the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Although she died without realizing victory in her struggle to institute the Equal Rights Amendment, many of the goals she sought came to pass nevertheless, partly because of the half-century of supreme effort she exerted to realize her great dream.

Further Reading

Barker-Benfield, G. J., and Catherine Clinton, eds. Portraits of American Women: From Settlement to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. A collection of scholarly articles on significant American women from Pocahontas to Betty Friedan. The article on Alice Paul by Christine A. Lunardini presents a particularly effective analysis.

Becker, Susan D. The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. An analysis of Paul’s postsuffrage role in reorganizing the women’s movement along the international lines of the World’s Woman’s Party.

Butler, Amy E. Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the ERA Debate, 1921-1929. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Paul and Smith were proponents of equal rights for women but they had different views about the best way to attain those rights. This book explains their differences and its impact on the cause of women’s rights.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. A classic history of the women’s movement (highlighting Alice Paul’s role) by one of the great feminist historians.

Gallagher, Robert S. “I Was Arrested, of Course . . .” American Heritage 25, no. 2 (February, 1974): 16-24, 92-94. A fascinating and penetrating interview conducted with Paul three years before her death.

Irwin, Inez Haynes. The Story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. Fairfax, Va.: Denlinger’s, 1977. This is the primary history of the National Woman’s Party.

Morgan, David. Suffragists and Democrats: The Politics of Woman Suffrage in America. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1972. This is a narrow British interpretation of the politics of the American woman suffrage movement.

Stevens, Doris. Jailed for Freedom. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. This primary source focuses on the radical feminists who campaigned for the vote between 1913 and 1919. The work includes a valuable chapter on “General Alice Paul.”