The U.S. general elections are around the corner and political pundits are already inundating the news, streaming shows, and podcasts with their analysis. National and state-level polls are all over the place, showing a disconnect between what the polls are reporting and the reality based on actual results. Last week’s election results is a great example of this.

Voting is a right fought by many, and I believe that it is our responsibility as citizens to educate ourselves about the issues, come up with our best assessment and decision, and then cast our vote based on our analysis. I do not share the opinion of those who recommend not voting in the elections because they say that “people are wasting their time.” Democracy is messy but is the best system available to society.

Today I want to spend some time writing about a historical figure and a leader of the voting rights movement. People like her are what motivate me to continue learning about current issues and to cast my vote every election cycle. Her name is Alice Paul, and she took on the women’s suffrage movement starting in 1907.

Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women’s rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment’s passage in August 1920.¹

From her Quaker childhood in Moorestown, New Jersey, Paul went on to Swarthmore College, and then spent a year studying social work at the New York School of Philanthropy, and then a tear earning a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1907, at the age of twenty-two, Alice Paul won a fellowship to study and practice social work in Britain. While taking courses at the University of Birmingham, she went to hear Christabel Pankhurst speak. Pankhurst’s subject was woman suffrage in Britain. The audience, mostly men, tried to shout her down. Pankhurst kept right on, through all the cries and catcalls. Paul was hooked and joined the Pankhursts, which consisted of the three women, the mother, Emmeline, and her two daughters Christabel and Sylvia.²

The Pankhursts fought for women’s suffrage, and the movement started to gain attention among politicians in Britain. Paul first came to the attention of American suffragettes in November 1909. She was still in Britain, in jail at the time, serving a 30-day sentence for disrupting an annual banquet of the Lord Mayor of London. In January 1910, she returned to America and started to work on her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.³

Women suffrage was gaining traction and in 1912 state suffrage had succeeded in nine states. The movement started around 1890, so that makes one state every two and a half years. Progress was slow and at that rate women will gain the right to vote across the country by the year 2000. Knowing that Paul and Lucy Burns, another women voting rights activist, pushed for a federal amendment.⁴

Paul and other women continue their movement. One of Paul’s first big projects was initiating and organizing the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., the day before President Wilson’s inauguration.⁵ Then in November 1917, she was arrested for picketing, convicted, and sent to the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia which is now an arts center. I drove many times by that place on my way to work when I was stationed in Fort Belvoir, VA without knowing this historical fact.

She was sentenced to seven months, but before she was sentenced, she said the following to the judge when he asked how she pleaded: “We do not wish to make any plea before this court. We do not consider ourselves subject to this court, since as an unenfranchised class, we have nothing to do with the making of the laws which have put us in this position.”⁶ She was released at the end of November, and the movement continued. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the suffrage amendment on women’s rights to vote on May 21, 1919, which was quickly followed by the Senate on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification, achieving the requisite 36 ratifications to secure adoption, and thereby go into effect, on August 18, 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment’s adoption was certified on August 26, 1920.⁷

A fighter to the end, she went on to work on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. The first version of an ERA was written by Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman and introduced in Congress in December 1923.⁸

An extraordinary woman that epitomized the character of a true leader.

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I was introduced to Alice Paul by reading “Napoleon’s Glance” by William Duggan, a book about strategies and how people implement those to advance their goals. The book presents each person highlighting what they did during their time in about twenty to thirty pages. The book covers 10 stories that include Napoleon, Picasso, Ella Baker, Patton, among others. If you are interested in the book you can buy it in Amazon here (Amazon Affiliate Program).

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Paul ↩︎
2. Duggan, William. Napoleon’s Glace: The Secret of Strategy. (P.120-121). New York: Nation Books 2002  ↩︎
3. Duggan, William. Napoleon’s Glace: The Secret of Strategy. (P.122-123). New York: Nation Books 2002  ↩︎
4. Duggan, William. Napoleon’s Glace: The Secret of Strategy. (P.127). New York: Nation Books 2002 ↩︎
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Suffrage_Procession ↩︎
6. Duggan, William. Napoleon’s Glace: The Secret of Strategy. (P.140-141). New York: Nation Books 2002 ↩︎
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution ↩︎
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment ↩︎

• History