Alice Paul's Campaign for the Vote: Parades, Pickets and Prison, 1913 to 1920

Alice Paul. Collections of the Library of Congress.

On March 2, 1918, the front page of the Seward Gateway, a newspaper in Alaska, carried the headline "Alice Paul Has Measles." It reported that the militant suffrage leader was confined to her room but still running her campaign through the keyhole. Five years earlier she had arrived in Washington largely unknown, to work for a constitutional amendment banning voter discrimination based on sex. That a paper in a remote U.S. territory now found her measles newsworthy, the author of an essay on her, Mary Walton, says, showed how she had captured the nation's attention. This is a retelling of that essay, first published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission in 2020 and hosted by the National Park Service.

A sheltered start

Paul was born on January 11, 1885, in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, the oldest of four children of strict Quakers, in a home where music was forbidden. She attended Quaker schools and then Swarthmore College, which her grandfather and other Quakers founded. After graduating in 1905 she tried social work, living and working for a year in a New York settlement house, and concluded that it could not change the situation. In 1909, studying abroad, she joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant wing of the British suffrage movement. Her first job was selling its newspaper in the streets of London, which she forced herself to do despite her shyness and fear of public speaking, and her determination won her a place in its demonstrations. She was arrested seven times and jailed three times. Denied the privileges male political prisoners had, WSPU prisoners went on hunger strike, and the authorities force-fed them. She told her mother she never went through it without tears streaming down her face.

Turning to Washington

In 1910 Paul returned to the United States intending to be an academic and finish a doctorate in economics, having earned a master's at the University of Pennsylvania before leaving. But suffrage called. In 1911 she led Philadelphia's first street-corner campaign for the vote, speaking night after night for two months from a horse-drawn cart, with Lucy Burns, a Scotch-Irish Catholic from Brooklyn whom she had met in a London police station. The two soon tired of the state-by-state approach of the National American Woman Suffrage Association: after more than 60 years of it, in 1912 women could vote in only nine states, all thinly populated ones in the West.

Lucy Burns. Collections of the Library of Congress.

They offered to take over the association's moribund Congressional Committee in Washington, which was supposed to promote a constitutional amendment, and Paul's first plan was a parade of a kind never seen there. On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, a procession of some 8,000 marchers, mostly women, dressed in white or in colorful caps and capes and mixed with mounted brigades and decorated floats, went along Pennsylvania Avenue. The first float demanded an amendment enfranchising the country's women, and "demand" was a word nice women were not supposed to use. Onlookers soon spilled into the route and blocked it; men spat at the marchers, threw lighted cigarettes and hurled insults while police stood by. Paul, to many people's surprise, was pleased by the chaos, since the parade made news coast to coast.

Pickets, prison and the Nineteenth Amendment

Soon after, the association expelled Paul, troubled by her boldness and her refusal to hand over the money she raised. With Burns she founded the National Woman's Party, whose protests combined provocative demonstrations, new lobbying and publicity methods and strict non-violence even in the face of extreme hostility. Her target was Wilson, the first Democratic president from the South since 1848, whose support might sway anti-suffrage Southerners in Congress. In 1916 she sent young volunteers west to work against his reelection in states where women could vote, but nothing budged him.

On January 10, 1917, Paul led twelve women to the White House gates with huge banners asking Wilson how long women must wait for liberty and what he would do for woman suffrage. Calling themselves the Silent Sentinels because they said nothing, they came day after day, in rain and snow, and The New York Times derided them as silent, silly and offensive. When Wilson asked Congress in April 1917 to declare war, speaking of democracy and the right of those under authority to have a voice in their governments, the pickets seized on his words: new banners asked how America could call itself a democracy when 20 million women could not vote. Wilson was scorned as "Kaiser Wilson," and the White House gates grew ugly, with counter-protesters calling the women traitors and sometimes injuring them as they shredded their banners.

Silent Sentinels stand with their banners outside the White House gates. Collections of the Library of Congress.

The pickets were arrested on trumped-up charges of obstructing traffic and spent days, then weeks, in jail. Paul was sentenced to seven months, and when she was denied political prisoner status she began a hunger strike; others followed, and officials began force-feeding. On November 14, 1917, thirty-one pickets were sent to a Virginia workhouse, put in cold cells with rats and flies, made to do hard labor and fed a starvation diet. When word of their treatment reached the papers, pressure on Wilson grew, and in the same month New York voters approved suffrage and members of Congress began to see which way things were going. Wilson finally gave way, but that did not bring the Senate around, and Paul blamed him for failing to persuade his fellow Democrats. Her followers later climbed the statue of the Marquis de Lafayette in Lafayette Park and burned papers bearing Wilson's words on democracy; they were convicted of "climbing a statue" and held in a derelict jail whose air and water made them sick, where the city commissioner, a Wilson appointee, tormented the hunger strikers with the smell of grilled ham on two gas stoves.

Suffrage protesters burn a speech by President Wilson at the Lafayette Statue in Washington, D.C. Collections of the Library of Congress.

Time ran out on the 65th Congress, but when the 66th assembled in early 1919 the Nineteenth Amendment passed both houses. Paul was apprehensive: for women to vote in 1920 she had 14 months to persuade 36 legislatures, three-quarters of the states, to ratify. Some states acted quickly; in others governors refused to call special sessions, and the South was united against. By June 1920, 35 states had ratified, and suffragists expected Delaware to be the 36th, but it failed. The fight moved to Tennessee, where Paul sent nine organizers but stayed in Washington raising money, so she did not see Harry Burn, the legislature's youngest member, cast the deciding vote with a note in his pocket from his mother urging him to vote for suffrage. Paul's mother, Tacie, wrote in her scrapbook that Alice had at last seen her dream realized.

Paul did not stop at the vote. She wrote the Equal Rights Amendment and campaigned for it for the rest of her long life, living to see it pass Congress. She died on July 9, 1977, and the amendment later fell three states short of ratification.

Sources

• Mary Walton, author of A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, Alice Paul's Crusade: How a Young Quaker from New Jersey Changed the National Conversation and Got the Vote, first published July 8, 2020, by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission on its blog The Suff Buffs and hosted by the National Park Service; photographs from the Collections of the Library of Congress; rewritten in hubnx's own words.