Alice Paul was a suffragist and one of the main leaders of the campaign for the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Alice was born in 1885 to a prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania that believed in gender equality, service to others, and voting rights for women.
After working in NY, Alice decided that social work was not radical enough to bring about social justice. She left to study in England where she met Lucy Burns. They both joined the suffrage movement led by the Parkhursts where they learned protest tactics, including picketing and going on hunger strikes when arrested.
In 1910, Alice returned to America and joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1913, Alice, Lucy Burns, and Crystal Eastman organized the first suffrage parade where they managed to convince 8,000 marchers from throughout the U.S. to come to Washington to protest on March 3, 1913, the day preceding the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.
Half a million people lined the streets to see the parade. Some shouted support; others spat and attacked the women while the police did nothing. The inaction of the police brought national criticism, which helped to promote the suffragist cause.
Eventually, Paul left NAWSA because of disagreements about tactics and formed the National Woman’s Party, which picketed the White House for over two years. In 1917, Paul served a seven-month workhouse prison sentence in filthy conditions and was force fed for refusing to eat. Two months after her release, Wilson announced his support for a bill on women’s right to vote. It passed three years later.
After 1920, Paul continued her work, focusing on the Equal Rights Amendment, insisting that the United Nations include women’s equality in its charter, and working with Congress to add protection for women in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
SOURCES: retrieved from the following websites
https://pbs.org.wgbh
Go to American Experience: Woodrow Wilson.
Source: womenshistory.org /Type in Alice Paul
Source: alicepaul.org