Alice
Paul was born into a Quaker family in
Moorestown, New Jersey on 11th January, 1885. Educated in the United
States at Swarthmore College and Pennsylvania University, where
she earned a master's degree in sociology. In 1907 Paul she moved
to England where she was a Ph.D. student at the School
of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
In 1908 Paul heard Christabel Pankhurst
make a speech at the University of Birmingham. Inspired by what she
heard, Paul joined the Women's Social and Political
Union (WSPU) and her activities resulted in her being arrested
and imprisoned three times. Like other suffragettes she went on hunger
strike and was forced-fed.
After one arrest Paul met Lucy Burns,
another American who had joined the WSPU while
studying in England. Paul returned home in 1910 where she became involved
in the struggle for women's suffrage
in the United States.
In 1913 Paul joined with Lucy Burns to
form the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage
(CUWS) and attempted to introduce the militant methods used by the
Women's Social and Political Union in Britain.
This included organizing huge demonstrations and the daily picketing
of the White House.
After the United States joined the First World War,
Paul was continually assaulted by patriotic male bystanders, while
picketing outside the White House. In October, 1917, Paul was arrested
and imprisoned for seven months.
Paul went on hunger strike and was released from prison. In January,
1918, Woodrow Wilson announced that women's
suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure". However,
it was not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment secured the vote for
women.
Paul continued to campaign for women's rights and in 1938 founded
the World Party for Equal Rights for Women (also known as the World
Women's Party). Paul also successfully lobbied for references to sex
equality in the preamble to the United Nations
Charter and in the 1964 Civil Rights
Act. Alice Paul died in Moorestown, New Jersey, on 9th July, in
1977.
(1) Leaflet written and distributed
by Alice Paul outside of the White House.
President Wilson and Envoy Root
are deceiving Russia. They say "We are a democracy. Help us to
win the war so that democracies may survive." We women of America
tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are
denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of
their national enfranchisement. Help us make this nation really free.
Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can
claim free Russia as an ally.
(2) Alice Paul, letter to Doris
Stevens (November, 1917)
At night, in the early morning,
all through the day there were cries and shrieks and moans from the
patients. It was terrifying. One particularly meloncholy moan used
to keep up hour after hour with the regularity of a heart beat. I
said to myself, "Now I have to endure this. I have got to live
through this somehow. I pretend these moans are the noise of an elevated
train, beginning faintly in the distance and getting louder as it
comes nearer." Such childish devices were helpful to me.
(3) Rose Winslow was in prison
with Alice Paul in November 1917.
Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding. I was vomiting continuously
during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere
that is painful. Don't let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul
vomits much. I do, too, except when I'm not nervous, as I have been
every time against my will. We think of the coming feeding all day.
It is horrible.
(4) Crystal
Eastman, Time
and Tide
(20th July, 1923)
History
has known dedicated souls from the beginning, men and women whose
every waking moment is devoted to an impersonal end, leaders of a
"cause" who are ready at any moment quite simply to die
for it. But is it rare to find in one human being this passion for
service and sacrifice combined first with the shrewd calculating mind
of a born political leader, and second with the ruthless driving force,
sure judgment and phenomenal grasp of detail that characterize a great
entrepreneur.
It is no exaggeration
to say that these qualities are united in Alice Paul, the woman who
inspired, organized and led to victory the militant suffrage movement
in America and is now head of the Woman's Parry, a strong group of
conscious feminists who have set out to end the "subjection of
women" in all its forms.
Alice Paul comes of Quaker
stock and there is in her bearing that powerful serenity so characteristic
of the successful Quaker. Like many another famous general she is
well under five foot six, a slender, dark woman with a pale, often
haggard face, and great earnest childlike eyes that seem to seize
you and hold you to her purpose despite your own desires and intentions.
During that seven year suffrage campaign she worked so continuously,
ate so little and slept
so little that she always seemed to be wasting away before our eyes.
Once in the early years, when the Union was housed in a basement impossible
to ventilate she seemed so near to collapse that she was taken, under
protest, to a nearby hospital to rest. But she had a telephone put
in by her bed, and went right on with the campaign, forgetting, as
usual, to eat and sleep. After a few weeks of this she got up and
packed her bag and came back to the foul air and artificial light
of that crowded basement headquarters. And nothing more was said about
a breakdown. The truth is, of course, that she looks frail, as anyone
would who was subjected to constant overwork and under- nourishment,
but actually she possesses a bodily constitution of extraordinary
strength, and a power of physical endurance that quite matches her
indomitable spirit.
(5) Alice
Paul, letter to Heywood
Broun after
an article he published on Inez
Milholland (26th
August, 1924)
I have read your statement
that the Woman's Party "did not want a Negro to speak at the
grave of Inez Milholland" and am writing to give you the facts.
The pilgrimage to the grave
of Inez Milholland was organized by the Woman's Party. It consisted
almost entirely of Woman's Party members who had worked with Inez
in the suffrage fight, although we also invited her family and friends
to accompany us. We arranged a very simple ceremony of music and singing,
and, at the urgent request of a member of Inez's family we arranged
to have no speakers at the grave.
Shortly before the service
began, Mr. Milholland, the father of Inez, told us that he had invited
Mr. Scott a distinguished Negro, to speak at the grave. We explained
to Mr. Scott that there were to be no speeches at the grave and asked
if he would place a wreath as the rest of us were doing, instead of
making a speech. To this suggestion he immediately acceded.
After we had placed our
wreaths and the choir was leading the procession down the hillside,
Mr. Milholland called upon Mr. Scott and Mrs. Hunton, secretary of
the Association for the Advancement of Negroes, to speak. The Woman's
Party members listened with courtesy to these two speakers and at
the conclusion expressed appreciation to them of what they had said.
These two Negroes were the only speakers at the grave.
At this point I want to
make clear that these two speakers did not intentionally break into
our service. They came to the pilgrimage, we understand, under the
impression that it had been organized by the Milholland family, that
speeches were to be made at the grave dealing with various political,
social and economic movements with which Inez had been connected and
that they were to represent upon this occasion the movement for the
advancement of Negroes. As soon as they learned that the memorial
at the grave was a Woman's Party memorial, that it was to commemorate
the service of Inez in the suffrage cause, and that there were to
be no speakers, they fell in with these plans and would not have spoken
had they not been publicly called upon to do so.
I would like, before concluding,
to take up two statements which you make. You write: 'They did not
want a Negro to speak at the grave of Inez Milholland, because, as
Mrs. Greta Wold Boyer explained, 'We want to try and elect some congressmen
in Southern States.'" This statement was not made by Mrs. Boyer
and could not have been made because we are not trying to elect congressmen
in any Southern State.
You attribute the following
statement to me: "This was arranged as a demonstration of women
and it was no place for colored people to speak." With regard
to colored people as speakers, we arranged as I have already said,
to have no speakers, and the question of color of speakers was never
discussed by us.
The Woman's Party is made
up of women of all races, creeds and nationalities who are united
on the one program of working to raise the status of women. In our
organization there is absolutely no discrimination with regard to
race, creed or nationality. If we had planned to have speakers on
this occasion, the question of their race would not have been considered
in selecting them.
We are sorry that this
controversy has arisen over our effort to honor one of our fellow-workers.
I think that all the women of the Woman's Party who went upon this
pilgrimage did so with the single desire of expressing their affection
for Inez. They had no thought of political effect or expediency in
what they were doing and greatly regret that the effort has been made
to use this pilgrimage against the interest of the woman's cause to
which Inez gave her life.
(6)
Rebecca
West,
reviewed Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens in Time
and Tide
on 24th March, 1922.
The resuscitation
of the suffrage agitation in the United States from the catalepsy
of unhopeful routine into which it had fallen at the death of Susan
B. Anthony, was due to Alice Paul, whom many of us remember as a brown
wisp of
Americanism who had rather unaccountably strayed into the ranks of
Holloway prisoners. It appears that she returned home an inspired
leader. She was equipped with that gift of double vision which, though
we speak of those prophets we respect as single-eyed, is nevertheless
the first necessity of great leadership: a Talleyrand-like awareness
of the baseness of our enemies and the infirmities of our supporters
combined with a Franciscan faith that innocency is the normal condition
of human affairs, and will prevail again when these quite temporary
disturbances are quelled. She had magnificent courage of the profound,
enduring sort. This she needed badly, for apart from the rough and
tumble of street attacks and forcible feeding (which she had already
experienced in Holloway) she was exposed to great mental torture.
When she led a hunger strike in the Washington District Jail the authorities
sent doctors to her, who made it plain to her that they were examining
her with a view to sending her to the State Asylum as a victim of
persecution mania, on the ground that she had an obsession on the
subject of President Wilson. As this had no effect on her resolution,
they then put her in a psychopathic ward among criminal lunatics,
who were awaiting dispatch to the asylum, and ordered a nurse to go
to her once every hour all through the night and flash an electric
light into her face, so that she was prevented from sleeping for more
than a few minutes at a time. This also had no effect upon her, and
she carried on the hunger strike till
the Administration was beaten and had to release all suffrage prisoners.
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