Alice Paul
Suffragette, women’s rights activist
Born: January 11, 1885, in Mount Laurel, New Jersey
Died: July 9, 1977, in Moorestown, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2010: Public Service
In dedicating her entire adult life to securing equal rights for women, Alice Paul made a major contribution to the cause of freedom in America.
Born into a well-to-do Quaker family, Paul attended Swarthmore College and earned a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. While continuing her education at the London School of Economics, she got her first taste of activism—and was jailed three times for participation in demonstrations for women’s suffrage.
At one protest in Glasgow, Scotland, Paul and fellow suffragists were beaten by police. During her third imprisonment, she staged a hunger strike and was force fed through a nasal tube to keep her strong enough to finish her one-month sentence.
Returning to America in 1910, she earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, writing a dissertation on women’s legal rights in America. After graduation, Paul emerged as a leader in the suffragist movement. In 1913, she organized a parade through the nation’s capital on the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration demanding a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for women. The following year, Paul founded the National Women’s Party (NWP) to focus solely on the suffrage issue.
As leader of the NWP, Paul organized daily picketing outside the gates of the White House. Known as “silent sentinels,” the picketers engaged in a nonviolent civil-disobedience campaign that stretched over two years and resulted in the arrests and incarceration of Paul and many of her fellow suffragists. To protest the horrid conditions they faced in prison, Paul staged another hunger strike and again was force fed. In November 1917, the prisoners were released; shortly thereafter, President Wilson announced his support for women’s suffrage.
After passage in August 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment, prohibiting sex discrimination in the right to vote, Paul and the NWP continued the fight for women’s rights. In 1923, Paul was involved in drafting the original version of the Equal Rights Amendment. For the rest of her life, she actively fought for passage of the ERA.
In the 1920s, Paul also turned her attention to the women’s movement in Europe and lobbied the League of Nations for equality. After World War II, she helped ensure that the United Nations included a focus on women’s equality in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her activism continued into the 1960s, when she played a role in assuring that women’s protections were included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Although the ERA has yet to be ratified, Paul’s legacy can be seen in the progress women have made over the past 100 years. Her work lives on at the Alice Paul Institute, housed at her birthplace in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. In the nation’s capital, the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument honors Paul’s contributions, as well as the work of her fellow NWP leader Alva Belmont.