Alice Paul

BORN: January 11, 1885 • Moorestown, New Jersey

DIED: July 9, 1977 • Moorestown, New Jersey

American suffragist

Voting rights activist Alice Paul was an important figure in the struggle to win support for the 1920 constitutional amendment that gave American women the right to vote nationally. Paul helped turn the movement into a highly public battle with some dramatic events, including an eighteen-month-long protest on the sidewalk outside of the White House.

"We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote."

Quaker roots

Alice Stokes Paul grew up on a large family farm in Burlington County, New Jersey. Born on January 11, 1885, the first of four children in her family, she was raised in a modestly wealthy and progressive-minded home. Her father was a bank president, and her mother, Tacie Parry Paul, was one of the first women to study at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. The school was founded by members of the Quaker religion, and the Pauls belonged to this religious denomination, too, which was formally known as the Society of Friends. Quakers generally held tolerant views on social issues and were known for their commitments to community service and social justice. They also believed that men and women were equal before God. As a result, many Quaker women went on to play important roles in various American social reform movements.

Paul attended Quaker schools and followed her mother into Swarthmore. She earned an undergraduate degree in biology from the college in 1905, but had become interested in political topics and sociology—the study of human society and its institutions—by the time she graduated. She went on to study at the New York School of Philanthropy before receiving a master's degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907. From there, she traveled to England to take courses at the University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics.

In both England and the United States, women had been working to secure suffrage, or the right to vote, since the mid-nineteenth century. Paul's mother had been part of this first generation of suffragists, as they were known, and took her daughter to a suffrage meeting when she was still a small child. The American activists, like their British counterparts, were largely middle-class women who had achieved a higher level of education than was commonplace at the time. Led by Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), these suffragists tried but failed to win adequate public and political support for a constitutional amendment that would give women the right to vote in all elections. Anthony and Stanton later formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which worked to win passage of laws that gave women the right to vote in some states.

Influenced by British suffragists

Until Paul's generation, the suffrage movement possessed many of the same characteristics as its membership ranks. It was a polite fight carried out by reasoned arguments. It avoided public scenes. A shift to more radical, or extreme, strategies occurred first in England, around the same time that Paul arrived there. She quickly found herself swept up by its energy. She joined the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose strategies included the disruption of official party meetings and sessions of Parliament, the governing body of Great Britain. Arrested for her participation in a demonstration, Paul met another American activist, Lucy Burns (1879–1966), when both were taken to the same London police station. The two would work together for the next decade. The pair brought many of the more radical ideas of their British counterparts to the American struggle.

Paul ended up serving time in jail and took part in a suffragists' hunger strike to protest her imprisonment. She was forcibly fed by prison authorities, and her situation was reported on back home in newspapers like the New York Times. She returned to the United States in 1910 and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania two years later. In her dissertation, a lengthy paper written to fulfill requirements for a doctorate degree, she examined the legal status of women in Pennsylvania. She then moved to Washington, D.C., to take a job with NAWSA. By this point, there had been some small victories in the American suffragist movement. Since the early 1890s, eight other states had followed Wyoming in granting its female population the right to vote. At the time, NAWSA's policy was to continue to work at the state level. It had no plan in place to seek a constitutional amendment again.

Paul disagreed with this strategy and felt the time had come to try again for a federal law. She also knew that there was now a younger generation of women, like herself, who were similarly doubtful about the strategy of "asking" the male political establishment to allow them the right to vote. Paul thought that the suffragist movement should, like its British counterpart, demand that right instead.

March on Washington, D.C.

Paul's first step was to urge the NAWSA executive leadership to create an auxiliary, or supplementary, organization out of a congressional committee already in place. The leadership agreed, and in 1913 the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) officially came into being. This was NAWSA's lobbying division, and its primary goal was to persuade politicians to pass a constitutional amendment that would give women the right to vote. Paul and her London colleague, Lucy Burns, were put in charge of the group. The National Woman's Party was also formed to assist in the effort.

Paul was a natural leader. She was also a successful fundraiser for the cause. In addition, she had learned from her experience in England about the power of using the print media to raise awareness about the cause.

Carrie Chapman Catt

Carrie Chapman Catt led the fight for women's voting rights in the United States as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). As its president, she guided the organization into its most important and dynamic era, when American women finally won the right to vote nationally.

Born Carrie Lane in 1859 in Wisconsin, Catt was raised in Iowa and worked as a teacher. She paid her own way through college and graduated from the Iowa State Agricultural College with a science degree in 1880. After serving as a high school principal in Mason City, Iowa, in 1883, she became one of the first women to rise to the post of superintendent of schools in the United States. Catt was married twice and widowed early. She was interested in women's issues and supported the suffrage movement. After joining the Iowa Women Suffrage Association in the late 1880s, she quickly moved onto the national leadership stage with NAWSA.

A forceful and persuasive public speaker, Catt spoke to audiences and political groups across the country. NAWSA's primary strategy at the time involved working to achieve women's suffrage on a state by state basis. Catt became head of the group's National Organization Committee after 1895 and was elected NAWSA president in 1900 when Susan B. Anthony retired from the position. Catt served as NAWSA president for four years until her health declined.

In 1915 Catt was asked to resume the presidency of NAWSA. During World War I (1914–18), she addressed the U.S. Congress on women's suffrage. In her 1917 speech, she reminded lawmakers that American women had done much to help the war effort. For example, women worked in arms factories to replace male employees who had been drafted for military service. Women earned wages, which were taxable by the government. But taxation without fair representation, Catt reminded legislators, was an injustice that led the original British colonies to begin the war of independence.

Catt told lawmakers that a growing number of women were holding prominent positions of responsibility and authority. Women taught in hundreds of public school systems across the nation as well as in colleges. Some held law degrees or were doctors, while others served the public and private spheres. Asking women to work for voting rights at the state level had some drawbacks, she noted. As recorded on the SoJustNet Web site, Catt asked lawmakers if they realized that the situation forced "women of education, refinement, achievement, to beg men who cannot read for their political freedom?… Woman suffrage is coming—you know it. Will you, Honorable Senators and Members of the House of Representatives, help or hinder it?"

The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote nationally, passed in both houses of Congress and was ratified by the minimum number of states to become law in August 1920. Catt then devoted her energies to a new mission: educating these new voters about their voting rights and responsibilities. She founded the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group that continues to work to educate all voters on the issues. Nonpartisan groups have no political affiliations. Catt was also active in the League of Nations, a post-World War I organization that was the forerunner of the United Nations. She died on March 9, 1947.

Recalling the major displays of suffragist strength back in London, she readied for her first major action, a march in Washington, D.C., on the day before president-elect Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924; served 1913–21) was to be sworn into office. This was in early March 1913, and eight thousand women paraded from the Capitol Building to the Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution. But tension was high at the march. Some men in the huge crowd that lined the parade route began shouting insults at the marchers. The unruly men even blocked the women's path and grabbed and pinched the marchers. The police did little to help the women. Many newspaper reporters were at the event, witnessed the harassment, and described the scene to their readers. When Wilson's train arrived in the nation's capital, there was scarcely a crowd there to greet him because the parade had become the day's major event in the city.

In the aftermath of the march, a congressional investigation occurred. As a result, the women received much sympathy from the public and the cause of women's suffrage came to the forefront of American politics. Paul's next strategy was again something she borrowed from the British. This was to challenge the party in power, the Democrats in this case, for failing to move forward on the issue. With Wilson in the White House, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress as well as the executive branch. But Paul and Burns continued to be at odds with the NAWSA leadership because they wanted to pursue such radical approaches to women's suffrage. To move ahead, Paul led the CU into a formal split with the NAWSA, which allowed her and Burns to work more independently.

The strategy to shame the Democrats worked to a certain extent. On January 12, 1915, the U.S. House of Representatives spent six hours locked in debate over a proposed constitutional amendment to grant women full voting rights in America. It needed a two-thirds majority to move forward, but came up seventy-eight votes short.

Begins silent protest

Some of the House debate centered around whether or not giving women the right to vote should be a constitutional amendment at all. President Wilson, for example, publicly supported the idea of suffrage, but claimed it was a matter for the states to decide on their own. Once again, Paul responded to the lack of progress by the politicians with another strategy. She announced that the National Woman's Party would enter candidates in the 1916 elections. They knew they could not genuinely expect to win any seats in the House of Representatives, but Paul hoped they could at least rouse public debate in the western states where women were eligible voters in some local and state elections.

Paul and the suffragists stirred up the 1916 elections, but their next move would gain them lasting fame. On January 10, 1917, twelve women appeared in front of the White House lawn along with a sign that read, "Mr. President what will you do for woman suffrage?" Holding purple and gold banners, they became known as the "Silent Sentinels," and their appearance is thought to be the first nonviolent act of civil disobedience in the United States.

Paul was part of the group, which took shifts and picketed for the next eighteen months every day except Sundays. Different signs and slogans were used, and some were directed at Wilson, who was about to start his second term as president. The newspapers gave daily coverage to the protesters, and the media attention brought other women to Washington as volunteers for Sentinel duty. Their peaceful protest became a more troubling situation in April 1917 when the United States entered World War I (1914–18), a conflict in which Great Britain, France, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies.

President Wilson had asked the U.S. Congress to approve the declaration of war by arguing that Europe needed America's help to ensure that democracy flourished in Russia and Germany. The protest signs carried by Paul, Burns, and the other women changed to reflect Wilson's words. "We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy," one of the leaflets put out by Paul's group read. "Twenty million women are denied the right to vote … Help us make this nation really free. Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can claim free Russia as an ally."

Arrested once again

These wartime statements angered some who believed the suffragists should not be mocking the president or government during a time of war. Paul's Sentinels were jeered at and mocked, and then began to be arrested on charges of obstructing traffic. Lucy Burns was one of the first to be arrested, but the charges were dropped. In mid-July, sixteen were arrested, and the judge ordered sixty-day jail terms when it appeared the women had no intention of quitting the sidewalk protest. Wilson pardoned them, however, and they were released from the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. The protests continued over the summer and fall, as did the arrests.

Paul was arrested in October 1917 and given a seven-month sentence by the court. At the Occoquan Workhouse, she spent two weeks in solitary confinement. The conditions at the women's facility were horrible, and what little food the inmates received was infested with mealworms. Paul's health rapidly declined, and she was finally sent to the prison hospital wing. There, she went on a hunger strike, and others joined her in the protest. Prison officials warned her that they could easily send her to a psychiatric facility, which offered even more brutal conditions. As her health grew weaker, officials worried that she would die in custody. They decided to force-feed her and the others. This was done by inserting a rubber tube through the nose, and then down the throat and esophagus into the stomach.

Paul and the others resisted the force-feeding. On the night of November 15, 1917, Occoquan guards launched a vicious attack on the suffragists in their cells. The assault was ordered by the warden, and Lucy Burns had her hands chained to the bars of her cell, above her head, for hours. Others were dragged, kicked, punched, and tossed against furniture and walls. One of them, believing her cellmate had just died, suffered a heart attack.

Ten days later, all the Silent Sentinel inmates were released. Six weeks after that, on January 9, 1918, Wilson declared that he would support a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. It passed in the House, but failed in the Senate later that year. The Sentinels took up their protest again in the summer of 1918. As elections neared in November, Paul urged Americans to vote against the lawmakers who had not supported the amendment.

Finally, in May 1919 the suffrage amendment passed in the House; in June it passed in the Senate. Paul and her group turned their energies to making sure that the state legislatures ratified it. An amendment to the U.S. Constitution must be approved by Congress, but to become law it also must be approved by three-fourths of the states. Each state legislature debates and votes on whether to approve amendments to the Constitution. Fourteen months later, in August 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to approve the amendment. American women cast their vote for president for the first time in the November election that year.

Author of Equal Rights Amendment

Although Paul had spent a decade of her life fighting for women's suffrage, her work did not end when the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect. Fair treatment for women in the world of economics was next, and this idea was spelled out in the Equal Rights Amendment, which Paul wrote. In 1923 she read it at a seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. The Declaration, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had been delivered at the first Woman's Rights Convention, which had occurred in Seneca Falls, New York. That convention is considered to be one of the pivotal moments in the women's suffrage movement in the United States.

Paul earned three law degrees and started another political organization, the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, which was sometimes referred to as the World Women's Party. She spent fifty years working to see the Equal Rights Amendment become law. In 1972 it passed in both houses of Congress and entered the state-ratification stage. There was heated debate over its merits during the next few years. But when Paul died on July 9, 1977, the amendment needed approval from just three more states. Two deadlines passed, and it failed to win the necessary majority and thus failed to become law.

A 2004 HBO film titled Iron-Jawed Angels starred Hilary Swank (1974–) as Paul. The movie dramatized the White House protest and Occoquan Workhouse hunger strike.

For More Information

BOOKS

Flexner, Eleanor. A Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996.

Frost, Elizabeth, and Kathryn Cullen-DuPont. Women's Suffrage in America: An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File, 1992.

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

Raum, Elizabeth. Alice Paul. Chicago, IL: Heinemann Library, 2004.

WEB SITES

Alice Paul Institute. http://www.alicepaul.org/ (accessed on July 5, 2006).

Catt, Carrie Chapman. "Speech Before Congress" (1917). SoJustNet: A Documentary History of Social Justice. http://www.sojust.net/speeches/catt_congress.html (accessed on July 5, 2006).