Alice Paul

Alice Paul was a leader of the American campaign for women’s suffrage, helping turn the demand for the vote into a sustained national movement of marches, meetings, and direct protest. Her organizing linked a challenge to women’s political exclusion with the broader question of whether women could act as a collective political subject rather than wait for rights to be conceded.

Organizing for the Vote

By 1913, only nine states had granted women the vote. The suffrage movement adopted tactics modeled on the militant English campaign, and Paul and Doris Stevens emerged as its leaders. They secured permission from President Wilson to march with banners and signs, then organized lectures, meetings, marches, and other demonstrations to press for women’s enfranchisement across the country.

Women voters from the nine enfranchised states traveled to the Capitol in a highly visible procession to demand a national vote. In Chicago, women assembled in a party dedicated to liberating their sex; the organization became the Women’s Party. These activities widened the campaign beyond states where women could already vote and made the claim to national suffrage a public, organized demand.

White House Protests and Imprisonment

In 1917, suffragists established a protest at the White House gates, holding banners and sometimes chaining themselves to the gates so that they could not be removed easily. After six months, authorities stopped the protest and sent the women to the Occoquan Workhouse. The imprisoned suffragists went on hunger strike and were eventually released. Their confinement and protest brought the campaign’s confrontation with political authority into especially sharp view.

Further demonstrations led to the beginning of riots, after which the government agreed to appoint a House Committee on Woman Suffrage. The Women’s Party executive committee held a conference in Washington, and a suffrage amendment passed the House on January 10, 1918. The next obstacle was the Senate: Wilson would not promise to exert sufficient pressure, and the Senate rejected the amendment by two votes. The campaign returned to protest at the White House gates, pressing the president to appeal to the Senate.

Legislative Outcome and Continuing Campaign

A Republican Congress voted for the amendment in June 1919, following the earlier House approval and the Senate’s close rejection. The account presents this vote as a major advance, not the end of the struggle: the fight for complete equality between the sexes continued for another ten years. Paul’s organizing therefore belongs both to the immediate campaign for a national vote and to a longer political effort that the vote alone did not resolve.

The campaign also developed an international dimension. At the sixth International Conference of American States in Havana in 1928, women obtained the creation of the Inter-American Commission of Women. In 1933, the Montevideo treaties elevated women’s status through an international convention signed by nineteen American republics, extending the story of organized political claims beyond the national suffrage amendment.

Historical Significance

Paul’s significance in this account lies in the campaign’s methods as well as its objective. Marches, banners, organized delegations, protest at the White House, and resistance in prison made women’s demand for political recognition visible and collective. The sequence of release, renewed demonstrations, legislative gains, and continuing struggle underscores the difference between winning a formal political right and achieving equality more broadly.

The book’s account of women’s subordination helps clarify the stakes of that collective action. It argues that women were dispersed through family, work, and economic ties to men, and lacked the shared institutions and solidarity that could readily turn them into an organized group. The suffrage campaign offers a concrete counterexample: through associations and coordinated protest, women asserted a common political claim. Paul’s role is presented as part of that effort to transform a demand historically treated as something men might grant into a movement women themselves organized and advanced.