Alice Paul, by Morgan Dykeman
(Image: Via LA Progressive)
A young woman chains herself to the White House. She goes to jail as a political prisoner and starts a hunger strike. She eschews the polite requests for reform from the generation before her and instead demands radical, systemic change. She wants liberty, and she wants it now.
She could very well be an activist in 2020, but this woman was a defining radical of the early 20th century. Her name was Alice Paul, and she’s the reason women have the right to vote in America today.
Alice Paul was a suffragist who turned the fight for women’s suffrage in the United States on its head. By the time Alice was born in 1887, the movement to give women the right to vote was already 40 years underway. Abolitionists, temperance advocates, and allies coalesced in Seneca, New York in 1848 to draft a list of demands on the matter of women’s rights, including universal suffrage for women. A movement was born.
However, by the time Paul was getting her education in the first decade of 1900, the efforts had stalled. Women still didn’t have the right to vote, and after nearly a decade of politely asking men in power to hear their plea, the fight had grown stale.
That’s when the suffragettes of England showed her how to get results. She went to England to study in 1907, where members of the Women’s Social and Political Union were enthralled in a militant campaign to secure the right to vote for women. Emphasis on militant: common tactics of the WSPU included throwing bricks and rocks, destroying property, and burning down the homes of politicians who ignored their demands. In a most striking act of rebellion, suffragette Emily Wilding Davidson threw herself in front of the King’s horse as it raced around the track during the Epsom Derby to make a dramatic statement on the need for equality. She was trampled to death for her cause.
Alice Paul became a quick study of the ways that English suffragettes dominated the news cycle. Compared to the mild-mannered methods of the American suffragists, the English counterparts seemed committed to getting the right to vote for women at any cost, understanding that freedom was the only thing worth fighting for. Alice took these teachings back to America with her and in 1916 broke from the first generation of suffragists to forge a new path: a movement for the right to vote for women that were willing to do whatever it took to win.
Under Alice’s direction, the fight for women’s suffrage escalated to new heights and heightened tensions. She organized the Women’s Suffrage Procession in 1913, which drew thousands of women dressed in all white to take to the streets of Washington D.C. the day before President-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The American people had never witnessed a spectacle of women as brazen and tenacious as the march Alice organized, and it quickly devolved to rioting and violence as male onlookers attacked and harassed the women. To Alice, the goal was accomplished: the march overshadowed Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration and made it clear to him that women were done waiting.
Alice had much more in store for the men in power after the march. In addition to forming a political party based entirely on the goal of complete equality for women under the law (The National Woman’s Party), she launched a civil disobedience campaign in which she and her fellow compatriots would regularly picket the White House. She called their campaign “The Silent Sentinels.” Their banners held one simple question directed at Woodrow Wilson: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”
After 18 months of no progress from the picketing, Alice ramped up her efforts yet again: She and the other women chained themselves to the fence of the White House. This was an unheard-of tactic to date and was considered exceptionally unladylike. The women, including Alice, were arrested and sent to jail.
To Alice, political imprisonment wasn’t a failure. In fact, it posed an opportunity. Instead of backing down and accepting defeat in prison, she led a hunger strike among the women. She refused to eat until women got the right to vote. The guards force-fed her, a brutal practice back then which involved shoving a tube down her throat without any anesthesia or medication. She stayed strong.
Alice’s refusal to give in and her promises that worse tactics awaited President Wilson if he continued to ignore her demands led to victory for the suffrage movement in the United States. 72 years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Congress ratified the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution at the urging of President Wilson in 1920.
The amendment reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Alice won.
American women and radicals everywhere owe so much to Alice Paul, who taught us that the most righteous fight is that for liberty, and we must do everything in our power to win.
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References
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/alice-paul
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