Alice Locke Park
Alice Elizabeth Locke Park was an American suffragist and a longtime defender of women's rights. She served as associate director of the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Committee of California.
Early life
On February 2, 1861, Alice Elizabeth Locke was born in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1884, she married Dean W. Park; they had two children. Her husband died in 1909.Career
In the late 1870s, Park became interested in the suffrage movement and attended conventions in Providence, Rhode Island in 1877 and 1879. In 1894, she joined the International Feminist Movement. Park became a pacifist in 1898. She was also a socialist and a vegetarian.She framed two pieces of California state legislation: the 1909 California Bird and Arbor Day Act legislated the protection of trees and birds and established a day for school children to be instructed in these environmental issues; and the bill which ensured equal guardianship of minor children to both parents. In the 1910s, she was State Chairman of the Literature Committee of the Political Equality League.
She was a member of the Women's Suffrage Association for 60 years. Once women's suffrage was legalized in California in 1911, she was a speaker at the Seventh Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, Hungary, in 1913.
In 1914, she declared: "I sympathize deeply with the tactics of the militants in London. I am tired of the English women being blamed for crudeness and for their violence. To them a great deal of credit is due for getting the votes for women in California, in giving publicity to the cause. If they did not destroy property and do things out of the ordinary, no one would pay any attention to them, and their action would be a pure loss."
She quit the Unitarian society over its failure to oppose World War I. She was a Delegate to International Women's Congress for Peace and Freedom at the Hague in 1915; in 1915 she was a member of Ford Peace Ship; she was a leader of the Women's [International League for Peace and Freedom]. She founded Palo Alto Women's Peace Party in 1915.
She protested Stanford University's establishment of a female quota for women and battled for women's rights. In her homes she held meetings for a pacifist group called the American Union Against Militarism. This later became the American [Civil Liberties Union].