Fighting For What's Right: Alice Paul

ALICE PAUL

by Carl Julin

Quick Rundown

Alice Paul was an activist for women’s rights during the early 20th century. Born in New Jersey in 1885 and reared in a Christian group home, she grew up attending suffrage meetings with her mom.

She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905 with a master’s degree in sociology and a PHD in economics. She then traveled to Britain to study social work, and then earned a PHD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1910. While in England, Paul met American Lucy Burns, and joining the women’s suffrage efforts there, they learned militant protest tactics, including picketing and hunger strikes.

Back in the United States, in 1912, Paul and Burns joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Alice organized parades in support of suffrage. The first parade was March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson would be inaugurated. About eight thousand women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. They hoped this would dramatize the denial of that civil right to women. However, authorities often suppressed female suffragists who employed such tactics.

Alice Paul was placed in confinement and beaten because of a picket she placed at the White House. The brutal things that happened to them helped gain public support for women’s rights.

Woodrow Wilson eventually announced his support in 1918 and on August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly ratified the 19th amendment, making it a law throughout the country.

Alice Paul also played a large role in the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, even though some people thought it would be harmful to women’s rights and labor laws for women. 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.

As Alice Paul is a fantastic womens activist, a monument would be appropriate for her and what she has accomplished. With it near the Horizon Hall on the Fairfax Campus, the presense of the monument would fit with the humanities and social science classes that would be held there.

Another location for the monument is outside the Capitol Building between the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of the American Indian that is the location of where the parade started. The monument is a reimaging of a photo where she was in front of the ratification banner. The image is quite well known, and the NWP Ratification Flag represents a state’s ratification of the 19th amendment.

Afterward, Paul and the National Women’s Party focused on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to guarantee women constitutional protection from discrimination. Paul spent her life advocating for this and other women’s issues. The ERA was ratified by 35 states in the 1970s, but by the 1982 deadline was three states short of 38 needed to become a constitutional amendment.

The monument is of an altered rendering of Alice Paul, originally her holding the ratification banner.

Concept art of the proposed look for the monument.

The Alice Paul Institute (API) is a non-profit organization based in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. API was founded in 1984 as the Alice Paul Centennial Foundation to commemorate the centennial of Paul’s 1885 birth. It was an all-volunteer effort until 2000. Today, eight paid staff, dozens of volunteers, and a board of directors work together to make the organization’s leadership development, civic engagement, and historic preservation work a success. info@alicepaul.org