FACTS ABOUT ALICE PAUL

Today in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified. In honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, I am providing some interesting facts about my favorite suffragist – Alice Paul. I have loved this woman since seeing the movie “Iron Jawed Angels.” I also highly recommend the YouTube video that adapts Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” to a women’s suffrage theme.

She grew up in a Quaker family. Her mother was a suffragist who encouraged her to support gender equality. She brought Alice to suffrage meetings. She taught Alice that “when you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until the end of the row.”
She was very well-educated. She finished at the top of her high school class. She graduated from Swarthmore (a college co-founded by her grandfather) with a degree in biology. She went to the New York School of Social Work (Columbia today) and got a degree in sociology. In Great Britain, she attended the universities of Birmingham and London. She got her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from Washington College of Law and another doctorate from American University.
She went to England to work in a settlement house for a few years. It was there that she became a radical suffragist. She met Emmeline Pankhurst and learned civil disobedience. Alice was arrested seven times in London and sent to prison three of those times. In prison, she was force fed 55 times when she was doing hunger strikes. One action where she was arrested was when she and Amelia Bloom disguised themselves as cleaning ladies to get into a banquet. When Prime Minister Asquith got up to speak, Amelia threw her shoe through a stained-glass window and the duo shouted “votes for women!”
Alice brought British suffragette tactics back to the USA. She made a big splash with a huge parade down Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. 8,000 women marched and about a half million people watched. Unfortunately, some of the men in the crowd disrupted the parade while the police stood and watched. It was basically a riot. She was forced out of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association because she pushed for more direct action than lobbying. Her National Woman’s Party was more in your face, even criticizing the progressive Wilson for postponing action on the 19^th Amendment.
Fed up with Wilson’s intransigence, Paul initiated the picketing of the White House. The “Silent Sentinels” were the all-white clad suffragists who stood outside with banners supporting suffrage. They did this for 18 months, not stopping when the U.S. entered WWI. Their supposed “unpatriotic” protesting sometimes led to assaults and arrests. Not for the male assaulters, but for the women for “disrupting traffic”.
Some of the Silent Sentinels, including Paul, were sent to jail or a workhouse where they were mistreated. When Paul and others went on hunger strikes, they were force-fed by being strapped down with their jaws pried open and a tube shoved into their stomach. For years after, Paul suffered from digestive issues. News reports favored the suffragists and put pressure on Wilson to do the right thing. The 19^th Amendment was passed due to the lobbying of NAWSA and the protesting by NWA.
After suffrage was achieved, Alice proposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. She also worked to get gender equality included in the preamble to the United Nations Charter and into the Civil Rights Act of 1964.