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

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[Amelia] Fry: … You had another meeting at Seneca Falls like the original one [in July of 1923].

[Alice] Paul: No, that Seneca Falls meeting was just to commemorate Seneca Falls. It was the seventy-fifth anniversary.

Fry: But you did submit an equal rights amendment wording.

Paul: Yes by that time I think I had gotten all my awful bills out of the way and paid.… I always sympathize at the end of these Republican campaigns, Democrat campaigns, because I know that somebody is being left with these awful bills. Because you really would have thought, with wealthy women like Mrs. Belmont and so on that, while certainly one couldn’t be too grateful for all she did, after all they all sailed away on their own lives. Suffrage was won and now the thing is over. We certainly had a hard time then.

But I would end up, it seems to me, by saying that when the ratification was over, we celebrated by putting in the Capitol the statues of the great pioneers who in large measure had started the modern campaign at Seneca Falls [in 1848]. It was one of the really big things we did, because it was starting women to have a feeling of respect for women and by putting statues of women in the Capitol when it had always been a Capitol of men. Until Jeannette Rankin no woman was venturing into the … Cosmos Club.… Then when we had a convention on and presented the statue to the Capitol, the last thing that we did in the suffrage campaign was that we voted to go on. Elsie Hill was very gallant and courageous and took the leadership.…

By the end of two years …, we sort of, I guess, gathered up some more strength. And this was a really very wonderful meeting up at Seneca Falls. There we proposed not only would we work for equality but we would work for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution. And we started on that campaign. That’s enough to finish up with.

Fry: And you did submit a wording of the amendment, which is in that issue of the Suffragist (or I guess maybe it was called the Equal Rights by that time).

Paul: … I made the speech, you know, presenting this [amendment]. Of course, by this time I had recovered enough strength I think to feel convinced that we ought to go ahead with the campaign and we ought to do it in the form of another amendment to have complete emancipation as our goal.… I said, “This is just a tentative proposal because we have asked a good many lawyers to work on the form and so on, and the wording doesn’t make much difference if we agree on what we want.” So I presented this:

“Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

That said it all, and I said, “That’s what we want, let’s say what we want.…”

That’s when I started in to study law because I thought, “I can’t do anything without knowing as much as the people who will be our opponents. I don’t know anything whatsoever about law.”

So I then went up and lived at the headquarters and early morning about six I went to the American University and enrolled in the law department, and I got my bachelor’s degree in law.

And then I thought, “I really don’t know much, I must say, still about law, as far as being able to cope with the people who say you can’t have any such amendment as that.” So you see we went around from person to person who was supposed to be a great authority. I went up myself to see Dean Pound at Harvard, who was supposed to be the greatest authority on constitutional law in the country, and Mrs. Lewis had her son work on it, and Elsie Hill met her husband when she and I went down to see him in the George Washington University law school to ask him to work on some kind of an amendment to the Constitution.

Fry: You mean, a man she later married?

Paul: Yes, her later husband. That’s where she met him. Everybody drew up things, and we knew they wouldn’t do. But I thought I wasn’t very well-equipped to be making judgments on this subject, so then I went on and took a master’s degree in law at the American University. And then I thought, “Still, I really don’t know very much about this—it is such a vast subject”—we had to study Roman law and all kinds of laws …, things like that, quite a lot to do. So I then took the doctor of law. By that time I felt really I could talk to people on this subject, because I knew that they didn’t know very much either. My feeling of complete ignorance they seemed pretty much to share.

So then the Judiciary Committee of the Senate paid no attention to us at all. We went to all the national conventions of the Republican party and the Democratic party that intervened … but 1923 was the first hearing on the subject of the new amendment, and the amendment was “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

Well, at that hearing—and this seems almost impossible to believe—all the women’s organizations that came, with the votes in their hands so they counted for something (while before nobody paid much attention to us or to anybody else when we went to hearings because we were all voteless), now became a great power, even more power in the minds of the congressmen and the senators than they really had, because they didn’t have back of themselves any united, strong group that would always stand together on this subject. But they got up and spoke and the congressmen certainly felt they had power then. All of them spoke, I think, against the Equal Rights Amendment. And if they didn’t speak against us they remained silent. They didn’t speak for us. So we were the only group that spoke for the Equal Rights Amendment when it was first put in.

Then we saw just what Lucy Burns and all these people thought we would find. Our problem would not be the Senate and Congress and the President, because now we were voters and had this power; but it would be changing the thought of American women, because more than half the country were now new voters. And if the new voters through their own organizations went up and said, “Please don’t have a thing to do with this. We don’t want women working at night. We don’t want women standing up to work, and we don’t want women to lose their alimony, and we don’t want married women working when their husbands are working,” and all these things that they said.… Well, we said, “Now we have a wholly different task, which is to change the thought of American women, really.”

So we started then to one convention after another after another and kept it up until this year. We are still keeping it up, the last one being the League of Women Voters and the one before that the AAUW [American Association of University Women]. I have told you all this, I think, before.

Fry: Well, yes, and I remember myself taking long lists of women’s organizations to use with congressmen for you. By 1971 huge numbers had gotten behind the Amendment.

Paul: I know, but you see our task through these years was this monotonous one of getting these women to change their minds to make them see what this principle meant and so on. So that’s what has taken, more or less, all these years to do. Well now, we went to convention after convention of the political parties. It was in 1940.…

Well, in 1940 for the first time we got in the Republican platform. Then in 1944 we got it in the Democratic one. That was a very hard-fought fight. Then we had it in both. Well, by that time Congress began to—

Fry: When did Republicans—?

Paul: 1940. 1944—Democrats. And that’s when we finally began to work with Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller because she was so prominent in the Democratic party. She came in and joined us then and laid our fight before the Democratic National Convention to put it in the platform, and we got it in.

Well, then Congress began to pay more attention to us. It was in the political party platforms, and the Judiciary Committee of the Senate began seriously to consider the wording.…

While I was not national chairman, I went down whenever I could to try to help—I went in to see Senator Burton, I remember, from Ohio, who was on the Supreme Court later. At that time he was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I went to talk about how it could be worded. I remember him saying, “Well, Senator Austin of Vermont, who is perhaps the most concerned man on the Judiciary Committee, and I have worked and worked and worked and worked and we still cannot find the wording that we think will express what you want.”

So this went on. We had asked Dean Pound, and the versions that everybody had given us we knew enough at least about law to know we didn’t want it. A great deal of this responsibility fell on me because I was now beginning to know a little bit about law, you see. So I think it was in 1943 that finally we took a draft to—Mrs. Broy went with me; she didn’t know very much about it but she was our political chairman so she went with me—to see Senator Austin. We handed him a draft, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged”

The Amendment read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress and the several states shall have the power, within their respective jurisdictions, to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.…” It was to take effect five years after ratification.

—what we now have, you see, the one that is now through Congress. So he studied it for a time and then he said, “Well, I really think perhaps this is just exactly right. I don’t see anything the matter with it. And I think it will probably give you just what we all have in mind. But I wouldn’t want to do it without Senator [Joseph Christopher] O’Mahoney of Wyoming who, on the Democratic side, is the chief person working for this measure.”

So Mrs Broy and I then went up to Senator O’Mahoney’s office. He was just departing for Wyoming where he lived, but he studied it and he said, “Well, you can go back and tell the senator that you just left that I will be, anyway, the second senator and I will support it, so you will have probably the man who is most concerned on the Republican side and the man who is the most concerned on the Democratic side.” So we did.

Then we were asked to make sure that the women of the country who had already (in a few cases, not many, but a few organizations had) endorsed the old amendment, “Men and women shall have equal rights,” these two men said, “We don’t want to put this in and then find that the women won’t stand back of us. So will you get the signature of the responsible person in every woman’s organization that has endorsed the old amendment (‘Men and women shall have equal rights’) saying that they approve of the new amendment.” So that’s what we started and did.

We drew up a paper with the new proposed amendment addressed to the Senate Judiciary and called up each women’s organization or had them come to see us, or in some form or other had them consider it, and we got a page of signatures of all these different women’s groups. None of them knew enough to have any objection! Especially when we said we thought we could get the Senate Judiciary to support this. You see, the difference was, the old one said, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” They took the position that while they personally were for equal rights throughout the United States, they didn’t think Congress had the right to interfere so much in the lives of individual people; they thought it ought to deal with the government; the government should not deny equal rights. So when we changed it to saying, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex,” then they all signed, they all signed their approval of the new one.