Welcome to our 23rd #womanoftheweek! Today, we will be discussing Activist Alice Paul. Enjoy!
A suffragist, feminist, and women’s activist. Those worlds all describe Alice Paul as one of the main leaders of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Consitution. Alice was born on January 11, 1885, in Mount Laurel. New Jersey Alice’s parents were very ahead of time embracing gender equality and education for women. She first learned about the women’s suffrage movement from her mother who was a member of the (NAWSA) the National American Suffrage Association and would join meetings from time to time. She later attended Moorestown Friends School where she graduated at the top of her class and later went to Swarthmore College where she became a member of the Executive Board of student government which sparked her political activism and graduated with a degree of biology in 1905. She later earned the master of arts from the University of Pennsylvania and later on moved to London to study sociology and economics and joined the militant suffrage movement by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) which was led by her mother, Christabel, and Emmeline Pankhurst. She was also repeatedly arrested and served the time of three jail terms.
During her work in (WSPU), she became very involved in the movement by first selling suffragist magazines on the street corner which gained a lot of backlash because of the negative views towards suffragists. She then quickly gained the trust of many fellow WSPU members because of her acts and increasingly became the visual of the suffrage movement. At some point while protesting Sir Edward Grey’s speech, she stated: “Well these are very wonderful ideals but why couldn’t you extend them to women.” In response, police dragged Alice out of the meeting through the streets as planned which gained mass amounts of press coverage and attention because it was viewed as public silencing of protest which worked since later crowds gathered around Alice and her fellow protesters demanding their release. Throughout her time she did many public acts such as attending an event to honor Lord Mayor day in which she disguises as a cleaning lady along with Amelia Brown hiding until the event started and when Prime Minister H.H. Asquith stood to speak, Alice threw her shoe and both women yelled “VOTES FOR WOMEN” in which later on she and Amelia Brown were both arrested and were sentenced to one-month hard labor.
In 1913 after many rallies and moving to America, Alice initiated one of her biggest campaigns organizing the Woman Suffrage Process in Washington a day before President Wilson’s inauguration, determined to put pressure on Wilson which she assigned volunteers to contact suffragists around the nation to participate and gathered a number of eighty thousand marchers. On the day of the event along Alice's desired Route Inez Milholland dressed in white and rode on a horse leading the event which can be said by the New York Times, “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.” The event was also added with banners and one of the most notable banners was written as ,” We demand an amendment to the United States constitution enfranchising the women of the country.” After the event, Nawsa's focus became lobbying for a constitutional amendment to secure the right for women’s votes. In 1917, after many protests and events, Paul and the other activists in the organization were given a seven-month jail sentence in which she and her fellow activists lived in harsh conditions. Due to those conditions, Alice began a hunger strike which led her to be moved to a psychiatric ward in which she was forced to eat raw eggs through a feeding tube. She later told a reporter from American Heritage when asked about the force-feeding that, “it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple thing as the right to vote.”
Later on in November 14, 1917, Alice and her fellow suffragists were imprisoned and endured brutality by prison authorities which are now known as the “Night of Terror.” Later on, two months after the event, President Wilson declared that there would be a bill on “Women’s Right to Vote” and finally in 1920, suffrage was achieved.
Later on Alice and many of her fellow activists focused on causes such as the Equal Rights Amendment which was later changed to the Alice Paul Amendment to guarantee women constitutional protection from discrimination which was later ratified by 38 states. Alice also played a role in getting the factor of “sex” added into the civil rights act of 1964 which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and ethnicity. Alice later died in 1977 in New Jersey but she is still remembered as a big key figure of women's rights and the right for women to vote.
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