“Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment”

About the Author

Alice Paul, one of the nation's most outspoken suffragists and feminists in the early twentieth century and beyond, was born to a Quaker family at their Paulsdale estate in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, on January 11, 1885. Her religious background is relevant because the Hicksite Quakerism the family practiced placed a great deal of emphasis on gender equality. She came from a prominent family, with ancestors who included William Penn on her mother's side and the Massachusetts Winthrops on her father's. Her maternal grandfather was one of the founders of Swarthmore College, where Paul earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1905. After attending the New York School of Philanthropy, she earned a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907 and then went on to study at England's University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics before returning to the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a PhD in sociology in 1912.

Her years in England, 1907 to 1910, were eventful. It was there that she served her apprenticeship in the struggle for women's rights. She came under the influence of the militant feminists Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, and during those years she earned her stripes as an activist through demonstrations, arrests, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and force-feeding. On her return to the United States, she enlisted in the suffrage movement, first with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, though she and the young women she attracted to the movement were impatient with the association's conservative tactics. Accordingly, she broke with the association to found the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913. The purpose of the new organization was to seek a federal constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. In 1915 she appeared before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to testify on behalf of the proposed amendment.

In 1916 the Congressional Union evolved into the National Woman's Party. Paul and her followers, dubbed the Silent Sentinels, gained notoriety by launching a two-and-a-half-year picket (with Sundays off) of the White House, urging President Woodrow Wilson to support a suffrage amendment. After the United States entered World War I in 1917, few people believed that the picketers would continue. They did, often writing such incendiary phrases as “Kaiser Wilson” on placards, leading many people to conclude that the women were unpatriotic. (The reference was to Kaiser Wilhelm, ruler of Germany, America's enemy in the war.) Public opinion began to sway in favor of the suffragists when it was learned that more than 150 picketers had been arrested and sentenced to jail, usually on thin charges of obstructing traffic, and that the conditions the jailed women endured were often brutal. Paul, in particular, was subjected to inhuman treatment and launched a hunger strike in protest until she and the other protestors were released after a court of appeals ruled the arrests illegal. Meanwhile, the National Woman's Party continued to campaign against U.S. legislators who opposed the suffrage amendment.

After the passage by Congress (1919) and successful ratification (1920) of the Nineteenth Amendment recognizing the right of women to vote, Paul remained active in the woman's rights movement. In 1921 she wrote an equal rights amendment in the face of opposition from more conservative women's groups, who feared that such an amendment might strip women of protective legislation—in such areas as labor conditions—that had been passed during the Progressive Era. Nevertheless, she campaigned to make an equal rights amendment a plank in the platforms of both major political parties, which she succeeded in doing by 1944. In November 1972 and May 1973 she shared her reflections on the women's movement with an interviewer as part of an oral history project conducted by the University of California, Berkeley. She lived long enough to see Congress approve the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, though the amendment was not ratified by enough states to allow it to become part of the Constitution. Paul died on July 9, 1977.