Women's History Month Profile: Alice Stokes Paul

In honor of Women’s History Month, Aloud is profiling a series of great women communicators of the past and present, starting today with Alice Paul.

Any way you slice it Alice Stokes Paul (1885–1977) was a remarkable woman. A primary driver behind the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote, she is also the person who conceived and wrote the original language of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA): "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction."

If you haven’t heard of Alice Paul before, well, you’re not alone. I encountered her name for the first time only last week, while researching Women’s History Month for Aloud. By today's standard of accomplishment, she would be a superstar, defined by big ideas, bold actions and an innate understanding of public relations and what we currently call guerrilla marketing.

Alice was intellectually gifted — she had degrees in biology, economics and law. But when it came to political advocacy, she was a true savant. She had an uncanny sense of how use of political theater to gain influence. To bring attention to the suffrage movement, she staged high-profile marches, recruited celebrity endorsers, even had demonstrators wear symbolic costumes. She was at one point committed to an insane asylum for her views. She was also jailed multiple times and went on a well-publicized hunger strike during her last incarceration.

As the daughter of Hicksite Quaker parents, Alice was raised to believe that men and women were equal, so you might say she was born a feminist. She formally joined the suffrage cause while studying in England in 1907. That’s where she met and began to work with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, famously militant feminists whose motto was “Deeds Not Words” — and whose deeds frequently landed them in jail. During this period she also met another American feminist, Lucy Burns, who would become her close ally.

When they returned to the U.S. in 1910, Alice and Lucy joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and stationed themselves in Washington, DC, lobbying for passage of the 19th Amendment. Using tactics learned from the Pankhursts, they organized a massive march up Pennsylvania Avenue by some 8,000 women — led by a socialite on a white horse — during the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.

Differences in priorities and tactics led Alice and Lucy to leave NAWSA and form the more radical National Women’s Party (NWP) in 1916. As leader of the NWP, Alice sent banner-holding women to stand as “Silent Sentinels” in front of the White House day after day. Many NWP members, including Alice and Lucy, were attacked by mobs, repeatedly arrested and ultimately sent to a prison workhouse where they were beaten and abused. The courage of these women is truly humbling.

Alice, Lucy and their supporters made sure word of their conditions in prison made it to the newspapers. The public outcry was so intense, President Wilson reversed his position and announced his support for women’s right to vote. The 19th Amendment finally passed both houses of Congress in 1919 and was ratified in 1920.

Believing that the right to vote was just the beginning, Alice Paul spent the rest of her life working toward the passage of the ERA. She lived long enough to see it passed by both houses of Congress in 1972, but as we know, it was never fully ratified. (Reps. Carolyn Maloney [D-NY] and Judy Biggert [R-IL] reintroduced the ERA to the House of Representatives in July 2009.)

Why don’t more people know Alice Paul’s name and story? It’s well known that history books generally have little to say about women — ergo, the need for Women’s History Month. At least in the 1950s and ’60s, when I was growing up, schoolbooks limited their commentary to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the founders of the women’s suffrage movement in the 1800s. Alice Paul, Lucy Burns and the others who worked so hard for passage of the 19th Amendment clearly deserve our attention, too.

For more information on Alice Paul, please visit Women in History and the Alice Paul Institute.
 

— Michele Hush