Alice Paul and the 19th Amendment

History 122 Research Document
A Long Time Coming: Alice Paul and the 19th Amendment

Alice Paul (1885-1977)

After the war, when the Fifteenth Amendment extended voting rights to freedmen but not women, suffrage pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1869. Eventually the organization grew to over two million members.

The triumphs of the suffrage movement began in 1910 when Washington became the first state to extend voting rights to women. California did likewise in 1911, followed by four other western states in 1912. Despite this impressive start, the movement had little support in some regions, especially the South. In the 1912 campaign for the White House, former President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed a woman suffrage amendment to the constitution, but neither Republican William H. Taft, the incumbent, nor Democrat Woodrow Wilson, would do likewise. When Wilson was re-elected in 1916, women in twelve states had the right to vote. Wilson still refused to give his support, and Congress was not inclined to propose such a "radical" measure.

President Wilson became the main target of Alice Paul, a brilliant activist who believed that women would never be "given" the vote; they had to fight for it. Born to a Quaker family in New Jersey, she attended Swarthmore College and earned a degree in social work. In 1907 at age 22, she traveled to England and worked with militant British suffragists. Repeatedly arrested in London, Paul went on hunger strikes and learned the value of nonviolent civil disobedience to garner publicity for her cause.

Continued

In 1776 the spirit of American liberty and equality was born; noticeably ignored were the rights of women. In a letter to her husband John Adams, Abigail Adams warned, "If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, no Representation." The Founding Fathers ignored the appeals of women like Abigail Adams, and the new American republic was a tyranny of men; but this gender-based inequality was destined to be contested.

Around 1840, American women successfully lobbied legislatures in fourteen states for property rights, wages for their labor, and child custody following divorce. Women's progress in political rights came more slowly. The first Women's Rights Convention, organized mainly by Quaker women, was held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The central issue was the right to vote, but abolition of slavery, abstention from alcoholic beverages ("temperance"), and other human rights issues also occupied the energies of women reformers.