Alice Paul and Womens' Suffrage
Alice Paul, a tremendous force during the women's suffrage movement of the 20th century, vehemently advocated for the rights of women and secured the establishment of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote.
Paul was born in Mount Laurel, New Jersey on January 11th, 1885. It was probably her Quaker parents who sparked her passion for gender equality and women’s; her mother even brought her to women’s suffrage meetings.
Paul was well-educated and attended Swarthmore College, earning a biology degree. she also attended the New York School of Philanthropy and gained a Ph.D. from the University of Philadelphia after returning from England to study social work. It was an England that Paul met Lucy Burns, who inspired her to join the Women's Suffrage efforts. techniques like militant protest picketing and hunger strikes were used to protest.
In 1912, both women joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Soon, Paul was the head of the Washington Chapter of the organization. However, conflicts arose within the NAWSA, so Paul and other groups of women left to create the National Women's Party. Once again, Paul utilized the parades and protest she had learned from the British women's suffrage movement to advocate for women's rights in America. Her largest protest was in Washington DC the day before Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated. In this daring feat, Paul was able to gather 8,000 women to march on the Capitol. She even managed to secure a meeting with Wilson. Despite her best efforts, however, Wilson was convinced that the addition of another amendment was inappropriate at that time, and she and her followers were jeered and harassed as they marched to the White House. The harassment only increased as the US entered World War I; at that time, protests and strikes were seen as unpatriotic. It got to the point where peaceful protests were broken up by police officers, and Paul eventually wound up in jail for 7 months. Despite the hardships she faced, she continued to fight, organizing hunger strikes even as she was in prison. Newspapers caught wind of her treatment and covered her story; it was then that she was finally able to gain public support for women's suffrage.
In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson officially and publicly gave his support for women's suffrage. Yet it would take two more years for the amendment to be approved by the Senate, the House, and the required 36 states.
Even after the amendment was finally put in place, Alice Paul and the National Women's party continue to work hard, focusing on implementing the Equal Rights Amendment and solving other issues related to women’s rights. She spent the rest of her life fighting for women's rights until her death in 1977.
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When looking at the events surrounding the ratification of the 19th amendment, in 1920, one thing that was likely key in helping women like Alice Paul push for more rights was the role of women in WW2. Woodrow Wilson himself, when he first gave his support for the right in a speech before Congress, acknowledged that women should not have to suffer and labor for their country without a voice in the government that put them into the war. It probably also helped that President Wilson's daughter was a suffragist and helped him see how the protesters were treated. The work that the early suffragists put in was so key to the ultimate result of women gaining the vote, but it took so long that many didn't live to exercise the privileges they had dreamt of. Nevertheless, this was a turning point in women's rights because they finally had a voice in the government that controlled their lives, both in the long term and on a day to day basis.
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