Alice Paul Suffragist PDF

# 19 ## Alice Paul ### JANUARY 11, 1885-JULY 9, 1977 ### VOTES FOR WOMEN! ## PICTURE THIS: A young Quaker girl on the lawn of her family's gracious home in the country. She's playing tennis with her sister and brothers. Or, she's playing checkers on the wraparound porch. Maybe she's in the library,...

# 19 ## Alice Paul ### JANUARY 11, 1885-JULY 9, 1977 ### VOTES FOR WOMEN! ## PICTURE THIS: A young Quaker girl on the lawn of her family's gracious home in the country. She's playing tennis with her sister and brothers. Or, she's playing checkers on the wraparound porch. Maybe she's in the library, absorbed in the novels of Charles Dickens. She's a quiet, obedient, nice little girl. Now picture this little girl as a young woman in the bustling Scottish city of Edinburgh. Her wrists are handcuffed behind her back and policemen are parading her through the streets. She's scaling a government building in Glasgow, lying on the roof at night in a pouring rain, waiting to break through in the morning to disrupt a political meeting. She's in a London prison, held down by five people, thrashing about wildly as she tries to escape the feeding tube the prison doctor is jamming down her throat. She's forceful, determined, angry young woman. ## Alice Paul was both the quiet Quaker girl and the militant suffragist. Alice's background hardly hinted at the woman she would become. She grew up New Jersey in an eighth-generation Quaker family and absorbed its sober, peaceful ways. She was sheltered from the outside world. "I never met anybody who wasn't a Quaker, except that the maids we had were always Irish Catholics," she said. Alice's mother was curious about suffrage, and she took Alice along with her to suffrage meetings at friends' houses. The ideas Alice heard stayed with her when she set off in 1901 to Swarthmore, a college her grandfather had helped found, and then to social work in New York City after she graduated in 1905. Pretty quickly, Alice realized that social work wasn't for her. She didn't see her efforts changing the conditions that poor people endured. In 1907, she went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate studies and then to England for more studies. While there, she attended a lecture by Christabel Pankhurst, the daughter of British suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst. The crowd heckled her, drowning out her words, but Alice was hooked. ## The fight for the woman's vote didn't really start in 1848 with the Declaration of Sentiments. Suffragist ideas reached back much further in our nation's history. During the Second Continental Congress that met in 1776 to form a national government, Abigail Adams urged her husband, future president John Adams, to "remember the ladies." "If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies," she warned, "we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." And, although America had broken away from the British crown, American suffragists considered Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft to be a mentor. (You might have heard of her daughter, Mary Shelley-the author of Frankenstein.) In her 1792 book, _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, Wollstonecraft argued that women's lowly status was due to a lack of education, not a lack of intelligence or ability. "Truth must be common to all," she wrote. Early in the 1800s, the American writer Margaret Fuller talked about expanding women's role in society. Her 1845 book, _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, made a case for political equality and a larger, more public life for women. "She possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time," said founders of the suffrage movement. In one of Alice's first militant acts, she and her friend Amelia Brown sneaked into a political banquet in 1909 dressed as maids, complete with mops and brooms. From a balcony overlooking the main floor, Amelia smashed a window with her shoe and the two cried out, "Votes for women!" That same year, Alice was arrested at a Parliament protest and ended up at the police station where she met Lucy Burns. The two formed a fierce alliance, just as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had done a generation earlier. Alice was jailed three times in England. It was there that she first went on hunger strikes and endured the nightmare of force feeding. Twice a day, guards held her down and a doctor forced a rigid, unwashed feeding tube down her throat or nose. The ice-cold milk and raw eggs they dumped in made her sick to her stomach, and she would vomit it all back up again. In college, Alice had been a small but hearty girl, active in sports. By the time she came back to the United States in 1910, she was thin, pale, and frail-looking. At home, the suffragist cause was sputtering. At first, the National American Woman Suffrage Association appreciated Alice and Lucy for their youth and enthusiasm. But soon, they ran afoul of the women who practiced polite, respectful lobbying. Alice and Lucy wanted the kind of action they had seen in England, and so they split off on their own, forming the Congressional Union. In Washington, DC, Alice organized parades and protests and rallied women from around the country. But she, too, could be prejudiced. In the massive suffrage parade of 1913, it was she who ordered black delegates, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to march separately at the back of the parade. Ida and other black women defied Alice's misguided attempt to gain the public's support through an act of racism. Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. Called the Lucretia Mott Amendment, it addressed inequalities, such as lower pay, that women face. It was finally approved by Congress in 1972, but didn't win enough states to be ratified. Despite the growing influence of the suffragists, Congress and the president continued to ignore their protests, so Alice doubled down. She started a political party, the National Woman's Party, and organized pickets to demonstrate outside the White House gates. Suffragists could boast a notable civil rights first-they were the first organized group to picket the White House. After organizing the first protest on January 10, 1917, Alice got a letter at the party's offices. "Dear Alice, I wish to make a protest against the methods you are adopting in annoying the President...I hope thee will call it off." The letter was from her mother! Alice didn't call it off. Instead, she was jailed three more times, in vile prisons overseen by cruel wardens. Again, she joined hunger strikes, even though she knew the brutality of force feeding. Alice's agonized screams echoed throughout the prison. "Don't let them tell you we take this well," a fellow prisoner said. "Miss Paul vomits much...it is horrible." Prison officials went so far as to try to commit Alice to an insane asylum. And, at times, she had to be hospitalized. But still she fought. "It is worth sacrificing everything for-leisure, money, reputation and even our lives," she insisted. When suffrage was granted in 1920, Alice celebrated quietly by unfurling a banner displaying thirty-six stars from the balcony of her headquarters-one for each state that ratified the amendment. Carrie Chapman Catt got President Wilson's congratulations and a victory parade in New York City, but Alice's activism didn't go unnoticed. "Your place in history is assured.... It is certain that, but for you, success would have been delayed for many years to come," one well-wisher told her. Even Alice's gentle, worried mother applauded her daughter's success. "Suffrage was granted to women & we voted for the first time for the President Nov. 1920," she wrote in her diary. "Alice at last saw her dream realized." Indeed she did. Alice and the long line of passionate suffragists who came before her. ## It is worth sacrificing EVERYTHING for leisure, money, Reputation, and even our LIVES. The image on the second page is a black and white photograph of a young woman with serious eyes. She is wearing a dark hat and is facing slightly to the left. The background is yellow with blue stars. At the bottom of the page are three men in silhouette. They are standing and appear to be marching. They seem to be policemen. The text is in a stylized font, and the background is a mix of yellow, blue, and white.