Alice Paul
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragette, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.
Paul often suffered police brutality and other physical abuse for her activism, always responding with nonviolence. She was jailed in 1917 for participating in a Silent Sentinels protest in front of the White House, as she had been several times during earlier efforts to secure the vote for women in the United Kingdom.
After 1920, Paul spent a half-century as leader of the National Woman's Party, which fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Paul and Crystal Eastman, to secure constitutional equality for women. She won a major permanent success with the inclusion of women as a group protected against discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Early life and education
Alice Stokes Paul was born on January 11, 1885, to William Mickle Paul I and Tacie Parry Paul at Paulsdale in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey. She was a namesake of Alice Stokes, her maternal grandmother and the wife of William Parry. Her siblings were Willam Mickle Paul II, Helen Paul Shearer, and Parry Haines Paul. She grew up in the Quaker tradition of public service; Alice Paul first learned about women's suffrage from her mother, a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and would sometimes join her mother in attending suffragist meetings.Paul attended nearby Moorestown Friends School, where she graduated at the top of her class. In 1901, she entered Swarthmore College, which had been co-founded in 1864 by her grandfather and other Hicksite Friends. While at Swarthmore, Paul served on the executive board of Student Government, an experience which may have sparked her excitement for political activism. She graduated from Swarthmore with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1905.
After graduation, partly to avoid going into teaching, Paul pursued a fellowship year in New York City, living on the Lower East Side at the Rivington Street Settlement House. Working in the settlement movement reinforced her determination to right perceived injustices in America, but Paul soon realized that social work was not the way she was to achieve this goal: "I knew in a very short time I was never going to be a social worker, because I could see that social workers were not doing much good in the world... you couldn't change the situation by social work."
In 1907, after completing coursework in political science, sociology, and economics, Paul earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She continued her studies at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England. Paul also took economics classes from the University of Birmingham while continuing to earn money doing social work. It was at Birmingham that she first heard Christabel Pankhurst speak. When Paul later moved to London to study sociology and economics at the London School of Economics, she joined the militant suffrage group the Women's Social and Political Union led by Christabel and her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst. Paul was arrested repeatedly in London during suffrage demonstrations and served three jail terms. After returning from England in 1910, she attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Ph.D. in sociology in 1912. Her dissertation was entitled "The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania"; it addressed the history of the women's movement in Pennsylvania and the rest of the U.S. and urged woman suffrage as the key issue of the day.
After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Paul enrolled at two law schools, taking day and evening classes to finish more quickly. In 1922, Paul received her LL.B degree from the Washington College of Law at American University. In 1927, she earned a master of laws degree, and in 1928, a doctorate in civil law from American University.
Career
Britain
Early work in British woman suffrage
In 1907, after completing her master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Paul moved to England, where she eventually became deeply involved with the British women's suffrage movement, regularly participating in demonstrations and marches of the Women's Social and Political Union. After a "conversion experience" seeing Christabel Pankhurst speak at the University of Birmingham, Paul became enamored of the movement. She first became involved by selling a suffragist magazine on street corners. Considering the animosity towards the suffragettes, this was an arduous task and opened her eyes to the abuse women involved in the movement faced. These experiences, combined with the teachings of Professor Beatrice Webb, convinced Paul that social work and charity could not bring about the needed social changes in society: this could only be accomplished through equal legal status for women.While in London, Paul also met Lucy Burns, a fellow American activist, while arrested in a British police station, who would become an essential ally for the duration of the suffrage fight, first in England, then in the United States. The two women impressed prominent WSPU members and began organizing events and campaign offices. When Emmeline Pankhurst attempted to spread the movement to Scotland, Paul and Burns accompanied her as assistants.
Paul gained the trust of fellow WSPU members through her talent with visual rhetoric and her willingness to put herself in physical danger to increase the visibility of the suffrage movement. While at the WSPU's headquarters in Edinburgh, Paul and local suffragettes made plans to protest a speech by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward Grey. For a week prior, they spoke with people on the streets to promote knowledge about why they were protesting against the Cabinet member. After Grey discussed proposed legislation he claimed would lead to prosperity at the meeting, Paul stood up and exclaimed: "Well, these are very wonderful ideals, but couldn't you extend them to women?" Police responded by dragging her out of the meeting and through the streets to the police station, where she was arrested. As planned, this act was viewed by many as a public silencing of legitimate protest and increased press coverage and public sympathy.
Later events involved even more risk of bodily harm. Before a political meeting at St. Andrew's Hall in Glasgow in August 1909, Paul camped out on the hall's roof so that she could address the crowd below. When police forced her to descend, crowds cheered her effort. Later, when Paul, Burns, and fellow suffragettes attempted to enter the event, they were beaten by police as sympathetic bystanders attempted to protect them. After Paul and her fellow protesters were taken into custody, crowds gathered outside the police station demanding the women's release.
On November 9, 1909, in honor of Lord Mayor's Day, the Lord Mayor of London hosted a banquet for cabinet ministers in the city's Guild Hall. Paul planned the WSPU's response; she and Amelia Brown disguised themselves as cleaning women and entered the building with the normal staff at 9:00 am. Once in the building, the women hid until the event started that evening. Then they came out of hiding and "took their stand". When Prime Minister H. H. Asquith stood to speak, Brown threw her shoe through a pane of stained glass, and both women yelled, "Votes for women!" Following this event, both women were arrested and sentenced to one-month hard labor after refusing to pay fines and damages for the window damage. She was imprisoned at Holloway Prison in London.
Civil disobedience and hunger strikes
Whilst associated with the Women's Social and Political Union, Paul was arrested a total of seven times and imprisoned three times. It was during her time in prison that she learned the tactics of civil disobedience from Emmeline Pankhurst. Chief among these tactics was demanding to be treated as a political prisoner upon arrest. This not only sent a message about the legitimacy of the suffragists to the public but also had the potential to provide tangible benefits. In many European countries, including England, political prisoners were given a special status: "hey were not searched upon arrest, not housed with the rest of the prisoner population, not required to wear prison garb, and not force-fed if they engaged in hunger strikes." Though arrested suffragists often were not afforded the status of political prisoners, this form of civil disobedience provided much press for the WSPU. For example, during a London arrest, Paul refused to put on prisoner's clothing. After the prison matrons could not undress her forcibly, they requested assistance from male guards. This act, considered shockingly improper by Victorian era standards, provided extensive press coverage for the suffrage movement.Another popular civil disobedience tactic used by the suffragists was hunger striking. The first WSPU-related hunger strike was conducted by sculptor Marion Wallace Dunlop in June 1909. By that fall, it was being widely used by WSPU members because of its effectiveness in publicizing their mistreatment and gaining quick release from prison wardens. Refusing food worked in securing an early release for Paul during her first two arrests. However, during her third prison stint, the warden ordered twice daily force-feeding to keep Paul strong enough to finish her month-long sentence.
Though the prisons staunchly maintained that the force-feeding of prisoners was for their own benefit, Paul and other women described the process as torturous. Paul had developed severe gastritis at the end of her month in prison. She was carried out of prison and immediately tended to by a doctor. However, after this event, her health was permanently scarred; she often developed colds and flu, which would sometimes require hospitalization.
Paul had been given a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by WSPU.