National Woman's Party

National Woman's Party. The National Woman's party (NWP), formed in 1917, had its roots in two earlier organizations.In 1913, two American students, Alice Paul (1885–1977) and Lucy Burns, fresh from “suffragette” actions in London, returned to the United States to revive the nearly defunct campaign for a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. (American suffragists at the time were focused on winning suffrage through individual state constitutional amendment campaigns.) Paul and Burns formed the Congressional Union (CU), initially a wing of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), but soon a separate and rival organization. The CU's first action was a controversial suffrage parade held in Washington, D.C., on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's first inaugural. It then embarked on a campaign to convince women already enfranchised by state action to vote against Democratic candidates in the 1914 congressional elections; the goal was to force the Democratic party, which controlled Congress and the White House, to support the suffrage amendment. A similar campaign was mounted for the 1916 elections, at which time a second organization, made up entirely of women voters and named the Woman's party, was formed. Members tended to be younger, more militant suffragists. Important figures included Mary Beard; Florence Kelley; Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and Alva Belmont, a wealthy New York socialite.

Despite the militants' campaign, Woodrow Wilson, who promised to keep the United States out of the European war, was reelected in 1916. The militants now formed a single organization, the NWP, which abandoned electoral techniques in favor of propaganda and demonstrations. In January 1917, picketing of the White House began. After America entered the war in April, the picketers were arrested; though tried on minor charges, some, including Paul herself, received sentences of up to six months. The resulting publicity so embarrassed the Wilson administration that all charges were dismissed and arrests ceased.

In January 1918, the House of Representatives passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, followed sixteen months later by the Senate. By August 1920 the ratification process was complete. The NWP and the NAWSA each claimed that its approach—militant civil disobedience versus law‐abiding lobbying—produced the victorious result, but more likely the combination, against the background of wartime politics, was responsible.

After enfranchisement, Paul was determined to keep the NWP an active feminist force. Claiming to have learned from the suffrage struggle the importance of concentrating on a “single issue,” she in 1923 committed the NWP to a campaign for another constitutional amendment that would ensure “equal rights before the law” for women and men. However, most postsuffragists objected to this platform, and within a few years the NWP's membership had dramatically shrunk. It survived, however, fighting for equal rights nationally and internationally. Paul stayed at the organization's helm until her death in 1977, at which time the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment was taken up by a younger organization, the National Organization for Women. Formally the NWP still existed at the end of the twentieth century, sustained by its ownership of a headquarters building, the Alva Belmont House, in Washington, D.C., within sight of the White House.
See also Catt, Carrie Chapman; Feminism; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Christine A. Lunardini , From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910–1928, 1986.
Ellen Carol DuBois , Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, 1997.

Ellen C. Dubois