fearless female
“It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun. There is hardly a field, economic or political, in which the natural and unaccustomed policy is not to ignore women…Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically.” Alice Paul 1920
Alice Paul was born on January 11, 1885 in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. As a Quaker, she was raised to believe in absolute equality and instilled with a dedication to a divinely inspired “concern.”
She graduated from Swarthmore in 1905 and then traveled to England where she enlisted in the Woman’s Social and Political Union, the original “suffragettes” headed by firebrand Emmeline Pankhurst. She returned to the United States in 1910, a veteran of imprisonments, hunger strikes and an ugly episode of force feeding.
She launched her American campaign with the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, a massive suffrage parade on Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Rallies, lobbying, petitions, parades, and election campaigns over the next four years failed to budge Congress or gain presidential support. At odds with tactics and strategy, she broke away and formed the National Women's Party in 1916.
On January 10, 1917, Alice Paul lead a dozen women to the gates of the White House. Calling themselves “Silent Sentinels” they spoke no words, instead carrying banners with their biting rallying cries. The suffragists were first harassed then arrested. They were sent to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where many of them, including Alice Paul, began hunger strikes. They were force-fed through tubes and threatened with commitment to insane asylums.
By the end of 1917, President Wilson finally announced support for the sufferage amendment but the Silent Sentinels continued to stand their post every day but Sundays from January 10, 1917 till June 4, 1919, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed both by the House and Senate.
For the rest of her life, Alice Paul continued to fight for the equality of women around the world. She wrote the first version of the the Equal Rights Amendment in 1922. She was instrumental in winning guarantees of gender equality in the United nations charger and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
Alice Paul died on July 9, 1977 at the age of 92.