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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In these interview sessions in late 1972 and the spring of 1973, Alice Paul looks back on her six decades of feminist activism, with particular focus on the Equal Rights Amendment. She begins by laughingly noting that the suffrage campaign had generated heavy expenses and that the bills had to be paid. She mentions “Mrs. Belmont.” Alva Belmont, though hardly a familiar name today, was a prominent and wealthy socialite who donated large amounts of money to suffrage organizations. She herself founded one of these organizations, the Political Equality League, in 1909, and she was a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In an effort to broaden support among immigrants, African Americans, and working-class women, she established a “suffrage settlement house” in Harlem, New York. Later she merged her organization with Paul's Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, and she was instrumental in helping Paul found the National Woman's Party. Using her own money, she purchased the party's headquarters building in Washington, D.C., now the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum.

Paul goes on to discuss her uncertainties about legal matters surrounding an equal rights amendment. Characteristically, in the face of her own perceived lack of knowledge, she went back to school and earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in law from the American University. Armed with solid academic credentials, she was able to persuade the Republican and Democratic parties to include support for an equal rights amendment in their platforms. Interestingly, she notes that some of the strongest opposition she encountered came not from men but from women—a pattern that would continue for the next half century. Many women, women's groups, and labor organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Consumers' League, and the American Federation of Labor, opposed such an amendment at some point. They feared that it would nullify protective legislation that had been passed to improve working conditions for women in factories and that it could deny women rights to alimony in cases of divorce.

One of the most prominent organizations that opposed Paul's efforts was the National Women's Trade Union League, which argued that an equal rights amendment would benefit primarily educated women who wanted to enter professions but would not benefit working-class women, who labored for wages and who had fought hard for laws that shortened their working hours and bettered the conditions under which they worked. The league feared that an equal rights amendment could bring into question the constitutionality of labor laws that recognized the distinctive experiences of men and women in the labor force, thereby forcing women to work under the same conditions as men. In later decades some women opposed an equal rights amendment in the belief that it could require women to, among other things, register for the draft, serve in the military, and use unisex restrooms, and that it would preclude the existence of exclusively women's (and men's) organizations.

In her discussion of efforts to gain support for an equal rights amendment as part of the Democratic Party platform, Paul makes reference to Emma Guffey Miller, who played a prominent role in this effort. Miller campaigned for Democrats as early as 1920. In 1924, after seconding the nomination of Al Smith for president at the Democratic National Convention, she earned the distinction of being the first woman in the party's history to receive a vote (though actually it was a half vote) for the presidential nomination. Later she served as chair of the National Woman's Party (1960–1965) and as the party's life president (1965–1970). Throughout her career she was a vigorous supporter of an equal rights amendment.

Paul goes on to discuss the mechanics of the proposed amendment. She and her supporters received advice from a number of people, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In particular, she discusses the change in the wording of the amendment. It was feared that the original wording—“Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction”—allowed too much interference in personal issues, which would endanger support for the amendment. Accordingly, the amendment was reworded to focus more on the action of government: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”