“ALICE PAUL AND THE 19TH AMENDMENT”
In 2018 Caroline, Susan and I toured the Belmont-Paul National Women’s Historical Monument in D.C. It is located behind the U.S. Capitol, and since 1929, it has been the headquarters of the National Women’s Party, which was one of the driving forces behind the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. It is a powerful exhibition of the history of the work to add the right to vote for women to the Constitution, work begun officially at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was at the Belmont Paul House that I first encountered the great quote “You can’t spell ‘formidable without Ida B.” The house is named after Alva Belmont, who funded much of the work in the 20th century for the passage of the 19th Amendment, and after Alice Paul, who was one of the leaders in the work for passage of that Amendment.
Alice Paul was born in 1885 in New Jersey to Quaker parents. They taught her that she had equal human dignity to men, and this idea of equality took hold in her heart. She went to Swarthmore College and did work as a graduate student in England. There she met Lucy Burns, an American involved in the women’s suffrage movement in England. Her mentors in England were Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. They both were arrested in the movement, and Alice Paul joined the others in a hunger strike against imprisonment. Like the other leaders, she was force fed in a brutal manner, which gave her digestive problems for the remainder of her life.
When they returned to the States, she and Lucy both joined in the movement for women’s rights. They proposed the radical step of seeking to get Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote. Leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had passed from the scene, so the proposal was seen as radical and impossible. Paul and Burns believed in it, however, and they set out to work. They started the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and focused its energies on winning the right to vote state by state. Alice Paul soon became disenchanted with this gradual approach and pushed the NAWSA to adopt a national approach and seek to get Congress to pass the proposed amendment first.
Paul then pulled out of the NAWSA and formed the National Woman’s Party, whose goal was getting Congress to pass the amendment, which meant that all the states would then be impelled to act on it. Having learned from the Pankhurst family in her time in England, she felt that direct demonstrations would move the political dial towards equality. She chose the day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson as President in 1913 to have the first major march, knowing that many folk would already be in D.C. for the inauguration. She called for women and men from all over the country to come to D.C. for the demonstration, and thousands arrived. It was led by the Beyonce of that day, a stunning woman named Inez Mulholland, who rode on horseback carrying the banner for equality for women. The march was controversial in many ways. Paul and other white leaders made the black women march in the back of the parade, fearing that white Southern women would be offended by any display of black equality. Ida Wells famously defied this order and stepped in to march with her Illinois delegation. The march was disrupted by white men, deeply angered and threatened by the idea of equality for women. Yet, Paul had made her point – it made national headlines and got the conversation going.
Paul was not through. She kept working, and in 1917, she organized the “Silent Sentinels,” a group of women who demonstrated daily at the gates of the White House, imploring President Wilson to support the proposed amendment. It was the first time that such demonstrations had been held regularly at the White House. The women were harassed, arrested, jailed and eventually went on a hunger strike. Many of them were force fed, and those women led a groundswell of the movement to pass the 19th Amendment. President Woodrow Wilson finally supported it, and in 1919, both the Senate and the Congress took it up, passed it and sent it on to the states for consideration. It passed by one vote in August, 1920, in the ratifying state of Tennessee, with Harry Burns casting the deciding vote, mainly because his mom put a note in his pocket, urging him to vote for the amendment. We give thanks for those who worked so hard for this 19th Amendment, especially Alice Paul.
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