The house where the Equal Rights Amendment was written

There is a brick house on Constitution Avenue in Washington, within sight of
both the Capitol and the Supreme Court. It is not large, and beside its
neighbours it is easy to miss. For more than ninety years it was the
headquarters of the National Woman's Party, and a great deal of what Americans
now take for granted about protest was worked out inside it.

Proximity was the strategy

The location was deliberate. The National Woman's Party bought a house where
the people they were lobbying could see it out of their windows, and where a
march could reach the seat of government in minutes. Under Alice Paul, the
organisation treated its address as a tool.

Paul had learned her methods with the suffragettes in Britain, and she brought
back a set of tactics American campaigners had not used:

• Picketing the White House, continuously, for the first time in its
  history — the "Silent Sentinels", who stood at the gates from 1917.
• Holding the party in power responsible, rather than lobbying sympathetic
  individuals across parties.
• Using arrest and imprisonment as publicity, and publicising the
  force-feeding of hunger strikers when it came.

These are now standard. In 1917 they were shocking enough that supporters of
suffrage publicly disowned them.

After the Nineteenth Amendment

Most accounts of the movement end in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment gave
women the vote. The National Woman's Party did not stop. Paul's view was that
the vote was a mechanism, not the goal, and that a constitutional guarantee of
equality was the goal.

She drafted the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and it was introduced to
Congress that year. It was reintroduced in every subsequent session for
decades. Congress finally passed it in 1972 and sent it to the states, where
ratification stalled — and the argument about its status continues.

The house is therefore not a monument to a finished campaign. It is the
working address of one that has run for a century.

Visiting

President Obama designated the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument
in April 2016. The site offers guided and self-guided tours, museum exhibits, a
bookstore, and a Junior Ranger programme. It is a house museum rather than a
large park: the rooms are the exhibit, and much of the collection — banners,
printing equipment, correspondence — is what the organisation actually used.