Alice Paul Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alice Stokes Paul was born in 1885 on her family farm, Paulsdale, near Moorestown in southern New Jersey. Raised in a Quaker household that emphasized education, nonviolence, and civic duty, she absorbed ideas about equality early from her mother, Tacie Parry Paul, who took her to suffrage meetings. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905, then trained in social work at the New York School of Philanthropy while working in settlement houses. Seeking deeper tools for reform, she pursued graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, ultimately earning advanced degrees that grounded her activism in political science and law. Her education continued in England, where study at the University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics overlapped with exposure to a more confrontational brand of women's rights organizing.

British Suffrage Apprenticeship
In Britain, Paul encountered Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union. She absorbed lessons in disciplined nonviolent militancy, from street demonstrations to civil disobedience. Arrested multiple times and imprisoned in Holloway, she joined hunger strikes and endured force-feeding, experiences that confirmed her belief that only national-level pressure would break entrenched opposition to women's political rights. In this period she forged a lifelong partnership with fellow American Lucy Burns, with whom she would later reshape U.S. suffrage strategy.

Organizing a National Campaign
Paul returned to the United States determined to focus on a federal constitutional amendment. Within the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she and Lucy Burns led the Congressional Committee, concentrating on Washington rather than state-by-state campaigns. A spectacular demonstration announced the new strategy: the Woman Suffrage Procession of March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. With help from organizers such as Mabel Vernon, Doris Stevens, and Harriet Stanton Blatch, and with Inez Milholland leading on horseback in white, the parade drew enormous crowds and violent hostility, underscoring both the movement's scale and the resistance it faced. Racial segregation at the parade exposed divisions; Ida B. Wells famously stepped into the line with the Illinois delegation despite instructions to separate, a reminder of the movement's contradictions. Differences over tactics with Carrie Chapman Catt and other NAWSA leaders grew irreconcilable. Paul and her allies formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which evolved into the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916, with crucial backing from benefactor Alva Belmont.

Confronting the White House
Beginning in January 1917, Paul and the NWP staged the Silent Sentinels pickets at the White House, the first sustained protest of its kind. Their brief, pointed banners held President Wilson publicly accountable for the lack of federal action. Arrests escalated as the United States entered World War I. Sent to the Occoquan Workhouse and the District Jail, pickets including Lucy Burns, Dora Lewis, and Dorothy Day faced harsh treatment. Paul herself was placed in solitary confinement, went on hunger strike, and was forcibly fed. News of the so-called Night of Terror in November 1917, along with resignations and interventions by supporters like Dudley Field Malone, generated outcry. The administration transferred prisoners, eased conditions, and the courts eventually vindicated the picketers. In 1918 Wilson endorsed a suffrage amendment; Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, and ratification followed in 1920. Paul never claimed sole credit, but her escalation of federal pressure, in concert with many colleagues and with NAWSA's parallel efforts, helped force the issue.

From Suffrage to Equal Rights
With voting rights secured, Paul turned the NWP toward legal equality in all spheres. At the 1923 anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, she unveiled the Equal Rights Amendment (often called the Lucretia Mott Amendment): "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction". She argued that "protective" labor laws for women, championed by reformers like Florence Kelley and agencies such as the Women's Bureau, entrenched inequality by limiting women's opportunities. The rift between equal-rights and protective-labor feminists shaped debates for decades. Paul deepened her legal credentials with law degrees from the Washington College of Law and American University and steered the NWP from its headquarters at the Sewall-Belmont House, both a home base and a symbol of sustained advocacy.

Global Advocacy
Paul extended her campaign beyond U.S. borders. In 1938 she helped organize the World Woman's Party in Geneva to lobby the League of Nations for sex equality in international law. After World War II she worked to embed explicit guarantees of women's equal rights in the United Nations Charter and subsequent human rights instruments. She cultivated alliances with women from many countries to resist reintroducing sex-based exceptions into postwar labor and civil codes, insisting that equality be a binding standard, not an aspiration.

Renewed Momentum in Midcentury America
Paul revised the ERA's language in 1943 to the now-familiar "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex". While many in Washington dismissed the amendment as quixotic, she sustained pressure through quiet, persistent lobbying. Her network included long-standing allies across the aisle; Representative Howard W. Smith, a powerful committee chair, introduced "sex" as a protected category in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an addition the NWP had urged for years. Though motives and credit were debated, the result gave women a new legal tool against employment discrimination. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a younger generation in Congress, notably Martha Griffiths, took up the ERA with fresh vigor, building on groundwork Paul had laid.

Leadership, Character, and Legacy
Reserved in manner yet uncompromising in strategy, Paul combined Quaker discipline with a relentless focus on federal power. She worked alongside and sometimes against towering figures of her era: friends and allies like Lucy Burns, Doris Stevens, Mabel Vernon, Inez Milholland, Alva Belmont, Mary Church Terrell, and Dudley Field Malone; antagonists or rivals such as President Woodrow Wilson, prison officials, and movement leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt who favored different tactics. She never married, devoted her life to organization-building, and kept her personal needs spare. After a stroke in 1974, she spent her final years in New Jersey and died in 1977. By then the suffrage victory she helped secure was a settled part of American democracy, and the ERA she drafted remained unfinished business. The headquarters where she worked, long known as the Sewall-Belmont House and today preserved as a national monument, stands as a testament to a lifetime spent turning conscience into law.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Alice, under the main topics: Honesty & Integrity - Equality - Human Rights - Perseverance - Food.

Other people realated to Alice: Rose Schneiderman (Activist), Mary Ritter Beard (Historian), Anna Howard Shaw (Activist), Crystal Eastman (Lawyer)