Britain Early work in British woman suffrage In 1907, after completing her master's degree at the
University of Pennsylvania, Paul moved to
England, where she eventually became deeply involved with the British women's suffrage movement, regularly participating in demonstrations and marches of the
Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). After a "conversion experience" seeing
Christabel Pankhurst speak at the University of Birmingham, Paul became enamored of the movement. She first became involved by selling a suffragist magazine on street corners. Considering the animosity towards the suffragettes, this was an arduous task and opened her eyes to the abuse women involved in the movement faced. who would become an essential ally for the duration of the suffrage fight, first in England, then in the United States. The two women impressed prominent WSPU members and began organizing events and campaign offices. When
Emmeline Pankhurst attempted to spread the movement to Scotland, Paul and Burns accompanied her as assistants. On November 9, 1909, in honor of
Lord Mayor's Day, the Lord Mayor of London hosted a banquet for cabinet ministers in the city's Guild Hall. Paul planned the WSPU's response; she and Amelia Brown disguised themselves as cleaning women and entered the building with the normal staff at 9:00 am. Once in the building, the women hid until the event started that evening. Then they came out of hiding and "took their stand". When Prime Minister
H. H. Asquith stood to speak, Brown threw her shoe through a pane of stained glass, and both women yelled, "Votes for women!" Following this event, both women were arrested and sentenced to one-month hard labor after refusing to pay fines and damages for the window damage.
Civil disobedience and hunger strikes Whilst associated with the Women's Social and Political Union, Paul was arrested a total of seven times and imprisoned three times. It was during her time in prison that she learned the tactics of
civil disobedience from Emmeline Pankhurst. Chief among these tactics was demanding to be treated as a
political prisoner upon arrest. This not only sent a message about the legitimacy of the suffragists to the public but also had the potential to provide tangible benefits. In many European countries, including England, political prisoners were given a special status: "[T]hey were not searched upon arrest, not housed with the rest of the prisoner population, not required to wear prison garb, and not force-fed if they engaged in hunger strikes." Paul had been given a
Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by WSPU.
United States After the ordeal of her final London imprisonment, Paul returned to the United States in January 1910 to continue her recovery and to develop a plan for suffrage work back home. Over half a million people came to view the parade. With insufficient police protection, the situation soon devolved into a near-riot, with onlookers pressing so close to the women that they could not proceed. Police largely did nothing to protect the women from rioters. A senator who participated in the march later testified that he personally took the badge numbers of 22 officers who had stood idle, including two sergeants. Eventually, members of the
Massachusetts and
Pennsylvania National Guard intervened, and students from the
Maryland Agricultural College provided a human barrier to help the women pass. Some accounts even describe
Boy Scouts as stepping in and providing first aid to the injured. The incident mobilized public dialogue about the police response to the women's demonstration, producing greater awareness and sympathy for NAWSA. In January 1917, the NWP staged the first political protest and picketing at the
White House. Picketing had been legalized by the 1914
Clayton Antitrust Act, so the women were not doing anything illegal. The pickets, participating in a
nonviolent civil disobedience campaign known as the "
Silent Sentinels", dressed in white, silent and with 2,000 taking part over two years, maintained a presence six days a week, holding banners demanding the right to vote. Paul knew the only way they could accomplish their goal was by displaying the President's attitude toward suffrage, so picketing would achieve this in the best manner. Each day Paul would issue "General Orders", selecting women to be in charge and who would speak for the day. She was the "Commandant", and Mabel Vernon was the "Officer of the Day". Paul created state days to get volunteers for the pickets, such as Pennsylvania Day, Maryland Day, and Virginia Day. She also made special days for professional women, such as doctors, nurses, and lawyers. and "We Shall Fight for the Things Which We Have Always Held Nearest Our Hearts—For Democracy, For The Right of Those Who Submit To Authority To Have A Voice in Their Own Governments." The capitalization of each word emphasized the gravity of the situation. With the hope of embarrassing Wilson, some of the banners quoted Wilson's own words against him. Wilson ignored these women, but his daughter
Margaret waved in acknowledgment, a major victory for the protesters. Although the suffragists protested peacefully, their protests were sometimes violently opposed. While protesting, young men would harass and beat the women, with the police never intervening on behalf of the protesters. Police would even arrest other men who tried to help the women who were getting beaten. Even though they protested during wartime, they maintained public support by agitating peacefully. More protesters were arrested and sent to Occoquan or the District Jail throughout this time. Pardons were no longer given. In solidarity with other activists in her organization, Paul purposefully strove to receive the seven-month jail sentence that started on October 20, 1917. She began serving her time in the District Jail. Whether sent to Occoquan or the District Jail, the women were given no special treatment as political prisoners. They had to live in harsh conditions with poor sanitation, infested food, and dreadful facilities. This led to her being moved to the prison's psychiatric ward and being
force-fed raw eggs through a feeding tube. "Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn't it?" Paul told an interviewer from
American Heritage when asked about forced feeding, "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 little thing as the right to vote." On November 14, 1917, the suffragists who were imprisoned at Occoquan endured brutality allegedly endorsed by prison authorities|258x258px
Post-Suffrage After Suffrage, the
National Women's Party (NWP) continued to lobby in Congress and abroad, advocating for legal equality for women. Alice Paul and NWP members successfully lobbied to include equality provisions into the
United Nation's charter, such as the phrase "the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small." NWP is credited with drafting over 300 pieces of legislation that became law. Drafted and delivered to Congress in 1923, the original text of the Equal Rights Amendment—which Paul and the
National Woman's Party dubbed the "
Lucretia Mott Amendment" in honor of this antislavery and suffrage activist of an earlier generation—read, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." In 1943, the amendment was renamed the "Alice Paul Amendment", and contained wording was changed to the version that still exists today: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." For Paul, the ERA had the same appeal as suffrage in that it was a constitutional amendment and a single-issue campaign that she believed could and should unite women around a common core goal. Paul understood the value of single-issue politics for building coalitions and securing success. Not everyone agreed about next steps or the ERA; from the start, the amendment had its critics. While Paul's activism in the years after suffrage centered on securing legal protections for women's equality in the U.S. and abroad, other activists and some members of the NWP focused on a wide range of issues from
birth control and air conditioning to educating newly enfranchised women voters. Some of Paul's earlier allies in suffrage found the ERA troubling, especially since they believed it would erode protective legislation—laws about working conditions or maximum hours that protected women in the workplace. If the ERA guaranteed equality, opponents argued, protective legislation for women would be null and void. The rival
League of Women Voters (LWV), which championed workplace legislation for women, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Paul and her cohorts, including a small group from the NWP, thought that sex-based workplace legislation restricted women's ability to compete for jobs with men and earn good wages. In fact, Paul believed that protective legislation hurt women wage earners because some employers simply fired them rather than implement protections on working conditions that safeguarded women. Women were paid less than men, lost jobs requiring them to work late nights—often a prohibition under protective legislation—and had long been blocked from joining labor unions on par with men. She also believed that women should be treated under the law like men were and not as a class that required protection. To Paul, such protections were merely a form of entrenched "legalized inequality", a position shared by suffragist
Harriot Stanton Blatch. To Paul, the ERA was the most efficient way to ensure legal equality. Paul expected women workers to rally behind the ERA; some did, many did not. While early on, there was hope among NWP members that they could craft a bill that would promote equality while also guaranteeing labor protection for women, to Paul, that was a contradiction. What's more, she was surprised when
Florence Kelley,
Ethel Smith,
Jane Addams, and other suffragists parted with her and aligned with protective legislation. While Paul continued to work with the NWP and even served as president again in the 1940s, she remained steadfastly committed to women's equality as her singular mission. Along with the ERA, Paul worked on behalf of similar efforts in state legislation and international contexts. She helped ensure that the
United Nations proclamations include equality for women. She hoped that this would encourage the United States to follow suit. Paul worked to change laws that had altered the status of a woman's citizenship based on that of her husband's. In the U.S., women who married men from foreign countries lost their U.S. citizenship and were considered by the U.S. to be citizens of whatever country their husbands were from. To Paul, this was a violation of equal rights. As such, she successfully worked on behalf of the international Equal Nationality Treaty in 1933 and in the U.S. for the successful passage of the Equal Nationality Act in 1934, which let women retain their citizenship upon marriage. Just after the founding of the United Nations in 1945, Paul wanted to ensure that women's equality was a part of the organization's charter and that its
Commission on Human Rights included a focus on women's equality in its
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She prevailed: the final version of the Declaration in 1948 opened with a reference to "equal rights of men and women". The ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923 and had various peaks and valleys of support in the following years as Paul continued to push for its passage. There were favorable committee reports in Congress in the late 1930s, and with more women working in men's jobs during the war, public support for the ERA also increased. In 1946, the ERA passed by three votes in the Senate, not the majority needed for it to advance. Four years later, it would garner the Senate votes but fail in the House, thereby halting it from moving forward. Paul was encouraged when women's movement activism gained steam in the 1960s and 1970s, which she hoped would spell victory for the ERA. When the bill finally passed Congress in 1972, Paul was unhappy about the changes in the wording of the ERA that now included time limits for securing its passage. Advocates argued that this compromise—the newly added seven-year deadline for ratification in the states—enabled the ERA's passage in Congress, but Paul accurately predicted that the inclusion of a time limit would ensure its defeat. In addition, this version put enforcement power in the hands of the federal government only; Paul's original and 1943 reworded versions required both states and the federal government to oversee its provisions. Paul's version was politically insightful and strategic: politicians who believed in
states' rights, including many Southern states, were more likely to support an ERA that gave states some discretion of enforcement authority than a version that did not. States continued to attempt to ratify the ERA long after the deadline passed, including
Nevada in 2017 and
Illinois in 2018. In 2017 and again in 2019, the Senate and House introduced resolutions to remove the deadline from the ERA. These or similar measures, if passed, according to some experts, would make the amendment viable again, although other experts dispute it.
1964 Civil Rights Act Paul played a significant role in adding protection for women in
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, despite the opposition of liberals who feared it would end protective labor laws for women. The prohibition on sex discrimination was added to the Civil Rights Act by
Howard W. Smith, a powerful Virginia Democrat who chaired the House Rules Committee. Smith's amendment was passed by a teller vote of 168 to 133. For twenty years, Smith had sponsored the
Equal Rights Amendment in the House because he believed in equal rights for women, even though he opposed equal rights for blacks. For decades, he had been close to the National Woman's Party, especially to Paul. She and other feminists had worked with Smith since 1945, trying to find a way to include sex as a protected civil rights category.
Views on abortion Alice Paul, like many early feminists and suffragists, was opposed to abortion. Paul was quoted as saying, "Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women." ==Personal life and death==