THE WOMAN WHO FOUGHT FOR OTHER WOMEN
ALICE PAUL
Alice was raised a Quaker in New Jersey, a tradition that already assumed women's spiritual equality. Graduate study in England put her in the orbit of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst's militant suffragettes, where she learned direct-action tactics, heckling ministers, chaining herself to railings, hunger-striking in prison, and endured force-feeding. She brought that toolkit home in 1910, impatient with the slow, state-by-state approach of the mainstream American suffrage movement.
Back in the U.S., she pushed the National American Woman Suffrage Association toward bolder tactics, organizing a 1913 procession down Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Wilson's inauguration. The march drew a violent mob and a congressional inquiry, generating exactly the national attention Paul wanted. Her insistence on a federal amendment over state campaigns split her from NAWSA, and in 1916 she founded the National Woman's Party to pursue confrontation on her own terms.
In 1917 she organized the Silent Sentinels, the first group to picket the White House, holding banners that threw Wilson's own wartime democratic rhetoric back at him. Arrests followed, and in November 1917 guards at Occoquan Workhouse beat and abused jailed picketers in the "Night of Terror." Paul herself was force-fed again and had officials attempt, unsuccessfully, to have her declared insane, but smuggled accounts of the abuse reached the press and turned public opinion against the administration.
Wilson reversed course in 1918, and the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Alice did not stop there, she drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1923, pushed sex-equality language at the early United Nations, and helped get "sex" added to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, decades of single-issue advocacy that outlasted most of her contemporaries. Alice never held office and did not live to see the ERA ratified, but she permanently changed what political protest could look like in America.
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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