Alice Paul
Alice Paul, 1885 to 1977, ran the confrontational wing of the American suffrage campaign: she organized the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on 3 March 1913, formed the Congressional Union that year and turned it into the National Woman's Party in 1916, and put the Silent Sentinels outside the White House gates from January 1917, where the picketing continued for about two and a half years and the pickets were arrested, imprisoned and force fed during hunger strikes.
Her methods came from the British campaign, where she had worked before returning home. Her aim was single and she pursued nothing else: a federal amendment, with pressure applied to whoever held power until it arrived.
The procession of 3 March 1913
The procession of 3 March 1913 was timed to steal an inauguration. Paul organized it for the day before Woodrow Wilson arrived in Washington to be sworn in, so that the incoming president's supporters and the suffrage campaign would be competing for the same streets and the same newspapers. Marchers went along Pennsylvania Avenue in organized sections, by state, by profession and by college, and the crowd broke into the line of march. The police did not clear the route, cavalry was eventually brought in from Fort Myer, and the failure of the city to protect a permitted parade produced a congressional inquiry, which is exactly the kind of publicity Paul had planned for and the city had not.
The procession also carried the movement's own racial politics into public view. Black women who came to march were pressed to walk at the rear rather than with their state delegations, and Ida B. Wells refused, waited on the sidewalk and stepped into the Illinois delegation as it passed. The campaign that had split in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment had settled nothing in the meantime, and the organizers' need for southern votes in Congress shaped the arrangement.
Where the tactics came from, and how she met Lucy Burns
The tactics came from Britain, and this is the one place in the American story where the British campaign genuinely belongs. Paul had studied in England and worked in the suffrage campaign there, where she was arrested, imprisoned and force fed, and she brought home a specific tactical kit: the mass parade, the deputation to the head of government, the standing picket, the refusal to plead, and the hunger strike. She met Lucy Burns in a London police station, where both were in custody after a demonstration, and the two of them ran the American militant wing together from then on.
What she did not bring home was the vocabulary. British campaigners were called suffragettes, originally as an insult; the American campaigners called themselves suffragists, and the words are not interchangeable even though the tactics after 1913 were.
The Congressional Union and the National Woman's Party
The Congressional Union was formed in 1913 as a committee inside the National American Woman Suffrage Association and left it, becoming the National Woman's Party in 1916. The break was strategic rather than personal. Paul wanted the federal amendment pursued exclusively, and she wanted the party holding the White House and Congress held responsible for the delay, including its members who were personally sympathetic. Carrie Chapman Catt's Winning Plan of 1916 took the opposite view and ran state campaigns and the federal amendment as one coordinated operation.
| Question | National American Woman Suffrage Association | National Woman's Party |
|---|---|---|
| Led by | Carrie Chapman Catt | Alice Paul |
| Strategy | State campaigns and the federal amendment together, under the Winning Plan of 1916 | The federal amendment alone |
| Chief methods | Lobbying, petitions, state referendum campaigns | Parades, deputations, standing pickets, hunger strikes |
| The party in power | Work with any politician who will help | Hold the governing party answerable for the delay |
| Once the country was at war | Backed the war effort and pressed the case alongside it | Kept picketing the White House through the war |
The Silent Sentinels, the arrests and the force feeding
The Silent Sentinels began at the White House gates in January 1917 and were exactly what the name says: women standing still, in shifts, in all weathers, holding banners and saying nothing. Silence was the tactic. There was no speech to interrupt, no meeting to disperse and no disorder to charge them with, which left the authorities the choice of ignoring them or inventing an offense.
The picketing continued after the United States entered the war, and that is when the arrests started. Pickets were charged with obstructing traffic, a pretext everyone involved understood as one, and were imprisoned, many of them at the workhouse at Occoquan in Virginia. Prisoners who claimed political status and refused food were force fed. Paul went on hunger strike and was force fed herself. The banners the sentinels held addressed the president directly and were reported at the time; this site does not reproduce their wording, and it prints no quotation attributed to Alice Paul, because the versions in circulation cannot be checked against a reliable text.
How it ended, and what she did next
It ended with the amendment. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on 4 June 1919, Tennessee ratified it as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920, and it was certified on 26 August 1920. The text is short and its operative sentence forbids the denial of the vote on account of sex, the same demand Susan B. Anthony had been arrested for acting on in 1872 and the same one the ninth resolution at Seneca Falls had put in writing in 1848. It says nothing about race, literacy or the poll tax, and Black women in the South, the women Sojourner Truth had spoken for at Akron in 1851, went on being kept from the polls.
Paul treated 1920 as an installment rather than a settlement. She drafted an equal rights amendment, the National Woman's Party introduced it in Congress, and she spent the rest of a life that ran to 1977 on constitutional text rather than on parades.