Alice Paul: Feminist, Suffragist, and Political Strategist

Alice Paul

Alice Paul: Feminist, Suffragist, and Political Strategist

Alice Paul, (born January 11, 1885, Mount Laurel, New Jersey, U.S.—died July 9, 1977, Moorestown, New Jersey), American women’s suffrage leader who first proposed an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Paul was reared in a Quaker home. She graduated from Swarthmore College (1905) and pursued postgraduate studies at the New York School of Social Work. She then went to England to do settlement work (1906–09), and during her stay there she was jailed three times for suffragist agitation. She also continued to do postgraduate work at the Universities of Birmingham and London and received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1907, in absentia; Ph.D., 1912). Returning to the United States, she advocated the use of militant tactics to publicize the need for a federal women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S.

Constitution. In 1912 she became chairman of the congressional committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association but soon differed with what she considered its timid policies; in 1913 Paul and a group of like-minded militants withdrew to found the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which in 1917 merged with the Woman’s Party to form the National Woman’s Party.

Paul organized marches, White House protests, and rallies. Her militancy in the fight for women’s suffrage led to her imprisonment on three more occasions before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Thereafter Paul took a law degree from the Washington College of Law (1922) and master’s and doctor’s degrees from American University (1927 and 1928); she also continued her activities on behalf of equal rights for women. She drafted and had introduced into Congress in 1923 the first equal rights amendment to the Constitution. When it failed to pass, Paul turned her attention to an international forum, concentrating with considerable success during the 1920s and ’30s on obtaining support for her crusade from the League of Nations. She was chairman of the Woman’s Research Foundation (1927–37), and in 1938 she founded and represented at League headquarters in Geneva the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, known as the World Women’s Party. Paul insisted that many of the troubles of the world resulted from women’s lack of political power, and she reiterated this view when World War II broke out: it need not have occurred, she declared, and probably would not have if women had been able to have their say at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I.

Elected chairman of the National Woman’s Party in 1942, Paul continued thereafter to work for women’s rights in general and for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution in particular. In the interim she successfully lobbied for references to gender equality in the preamble to the United Nations charter and in the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. Paul was long considered the elder stateswoman of the feminist movement.

Alice Paul was the architect of some of the most outstanding political achievements on behalf of women in the 20th century. Born on January 11, 1885 to Quaker parents in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, Alice Paul dedicated her life to the single cause of securing equal rights for all women.

Few individuals have had as much impact on American history as has Alice Paul. Her life symbolizes the long struggle for justice in the United States and around the world. Her vision was the ordinary notion that women and men should be equal partners in society.