Alice Paul (1885-1977) was an American woman suffrage leader who first proposed an equal rights amendment to the US Constitution.

Paul was reared in a Quaker home in Mount laurel, New Jersey. She graduated from Swarthmore College and pursued postgraduate studies at the New York School of Social Work. She then went to England to do settlement work, during which she was jailed three times for suffragist agitation. She also received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to the United States, she advocated the use of militant tactics to publicise the need for a federal woman suffrage amendment to the US Constitution. In 1912 she became chairperson of the congressional committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but soon differed with what she considered its timid policies; in 1913 Paul and a group of like-minded militants withdrew to found the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which in 1917 merged with the Woman’s Party to form the National Woman’s Party (Britannica).

Paul organised marches, White House protests, and rallies, and was imprisoned many times. In January 1917, Paul and over 1,000 ‘Silent Sentinels’ began eighteen months of picketing the White House, standing at the gates with such signs as, ‘Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?’ They endured verbal and physical attacks from spectators, which increased after the US entered World War I. Instead of protecting the women’s right to free speech and peaceful assembly, the police arrested them on the flimsy charge of obstructing traffic. Paul was sentenced to jail for seven months, where she organised a hunger strike in protest. Doctors threatened to send Paul to an insane asylum and force-fed her, while newspaper accounts of her treatment garnered public sympathy and support for suffrage. By 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced his support for suffrage. It took two more years for the Senate, House, and the required 36 states to approve the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote (Women’s History).

Thereafter Paul took a law degree from the Washington College of Law and master’s and doctor’s degrees from American University. She also continued her activities on behalf of equal rights for women. She drafted and had introduced into Congress in 1923 the first equal rights amendment to the Constitution. When it failed to pass, Paul turned her attention to an international forum, concentrating with considerable success during the 1920s and ’30s on obtaining support for her crusade from the League of Nations.

Paul was chairman of the Woman’s Research Foundation (1927–37), and in 1938 she founded and represented at League headquarters in Geneva the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, known as the World Women’s Party. Paul insisted that many of the troubles of the world resulted from women’s lack of political power, and she reiterated this view when World War II broke out: it need not have occurred, she declared, and probably would not have if women had been able to have their say at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I.

Elected chairman of the National Woman’s Party in 1942, Paul continued thereafter to work for women’s rights in general and for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution in particular. In the interim she successfully lobbied for references to gender equality in the preamble to the United Nations charter and in the 1964 US Civil Rights Act. Paul was long considered the elder stateswoman of the feminist movement (Britannica).

Sources used:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Paul

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/alice-paul