Alice Paul, born January 11, 1885, in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, worked throughout her life for gender equality. She was raised a Hicksite Quaker and attended multiple Quaker institutions throughout her academic career. She attributed much of her beliefs on gender equality to her Quaker upbringing, saying, “When the Quakers were founded…one of their principles was, and is, equality of the sexes. So, I never had any other idea…the principle was always there.” Eventually her studies would bring her to England, where she became part of the movements for gender equality and women’s suffrage.
In England, she encountered the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) for the first time when she attended a lecture by activist Christabel Pankhurst. She would later join WSPU with her new friend and fellow American, Lucy Burns. While members of the WSPU, the two participated in the unions’ more militant forms of activism, eventually leading to Paul’s imprisonment, where she went on hunger strikes and was force fed more than 50 times.
After her imprisonment, Paul returned to the United States and joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Pennsylvania to organize events and lectures. She would later be offered a position on NAWSA’s national committee. With her new position, she began organizing the March 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. This parade fell into chaos quickly, but national headlines brought the conversation of women’s suffrage to politicians’ desks.
After butting heads with NAWSA leadership over whether to focus energy on women’s suffrage at the state level or fight for a federal Constitutional Amendment, Paul decided to part ways with the organization and founded the National Women’s Party (NWP). The NWP most famously began picketing in front of the White House, the first to do this kind of public protest of a U.S. President. The women were nicknamed the “silent sentinels” because these protests were comprised of women standing silently outside of the White House with banners critiquing President Wilson.
Shortly after the NWP started picketing, the US entered World War I. Many viewed the sentinels’ continued protests of the President as unpatriotic. Tensions continued to rise and eventually led to nearly 168 suffragists’ arrests. Because their request to be treated as political prisoners was denied, Paul and many others chose to once again go on hunger strikes because they felt their arrests violated their right to protest. Eventually the mistreatment of these women was leaked to news organizations, and they regained public sympathy. Upon Paul’s release from jail, she and other suffragists were met with renewed support.
Following public outrage over the suffragists’ treatment and general growing support for the suffrage movement in general, President Wilson announced in 1917 that he changed his stance and was now in support of a suffrage amendment. Two years later, the House and the Senate voted to pass the 19th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. It barely passed the three-fourths threshold for ratification in the summer of 1920.
After winning the fight for women’s suffrage, Alice Paul knew her fight for gender equality was not over. She announced that she intended to author a new Constitutional Amendment calling for absolute gender equality, which she presented to Congress in 1923. Decades later, in 1943, she rewrote the Amendment to call for “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
Though both Republicans and Democrats added the Equal Rights Amendment to their platforms by the end of the 1940s, it did not pass in both the U.S. House and the Senate until 1972, during the second wave of feminism initiated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Alice Paul died at the age of 92, in 1977. She fought her entire life for gender equality, and her impact should never be forgotten. Shortly after her passing, the South Jersey NOW chapter, founded in the same town as her alma mater (Moorestown, NJ), moved to honor her by including her name in their chapter name, “South Jersey NOW – Alice Paul Chapter.” Although she never saw the ERA pass, her legacy of fighting for equality lives on through those advocating for the ERA’s recognition as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
For all her work and achievements, Alice Paul was not perfect. During her fight for the 19th Amendment, she was exclusionary to feminists of color and pushed back against including them in public marches and protests. This demonstrates that it is important to remember that influential people are also human and imperfect, while still acknowledging the good work that they did.
Where the ERA Stands Today
The ERA was sent to the states for ratification in 1972, along with a seven-year time limit. After that seven-year period was up and the required 38 states had not yet ratified it, Congress voted to expand the time limit by three more years. Unfortunately, by 1982, only 35 states had ratified the ERA, falling three short.
But feminists did not give up. Working with legal scholars, many argued that if 38 states were to ratify the ERA — and Congress were to pass legislation eliminating the time restriction — then the ERA could still become the law of the land. In 2017, Virginia became the 38th State to ratify the ERA. Days later, the House voted to remove the time limit. Since that legislation passed eight years ago, the Senate has yet to bring it to the floor for a vote.
Today, advocates and activists continue to fight to finally enshrine the Equal Rights Amendment and gender equality in the U.S. Constitution.
Development Intern, Bella Dawson
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