Alice Paul (1885-1977), U.S. woman suffragist, was born in January of 1885 in Moorestown, N.J.  Her parents were well-to-do, middle class Quakers whose lives were actively informed by the denomination’s moral and humane principles.  In later years when Alice Paul was asked what brought her to feminism, she said that it has always been there – in her home, in her young life.  She grew up with the assumption that men and women were equal, and only when she went out into the larger world did she discover this was not so.  She saw the disenfranchised condition of women in the light of political struggle and she would never again see it otherwise.

The fight for women’s right to vote, the suffrage movement, had almost died with Susan B. Anthony in 1906 until Alice Paul picked up the torch.  Among other things, she organized demonstrations, the most famous of which took place on Pennsylvania Avenue in March of 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.  Five thousand women marched.  They were attacked by hoodlums, were not defended by police and the next day hit the front page of every newspaper in America, thereby immediately putting woman’s suffrage back on the American political map.

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, thousands of suffragists pledged their support, folding bandages and working in hospital and government offices. Congress finally passed the women’s suffrage bill in June 1919, and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920.  Some 25 million women had won the right to vote.  Following the suffrage victory, women worked toward complete equality rights for women.

In 1923, three years after suffrage was granted, Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, which stipulates that no right be abridged by either the federal government or the states on account of sex.  For nearly 20 years she was able to keep the issue of the ERA before the Congress, but with the onset of the Second World War the entire question was submerged.  The ERA failed to ratify by enough states and is still not part of the Constitution of the United States.

What she has been is the embodiment of the revolutionary’s narrow intensity and burning energy for “the cause.”  Her life has been a vessel into which the necessity of woman’s rights has been poured.  She was the cause herself.  If Alice Paul had not lived, and been exactly what she was, we, the women of America, would not be today exactly what we are.