Alice Paul, Women's Suffrage and the ERA

Alice Paul (1885-1977), largely remembered for her militant advocacy in the fight for women’s suffrage, dedicated 50 years of her life advocating for an equal rights amendment. In the early 1910s, Paul witnessed radical protest tactics used by British suffragettes. Their influence caused her to leave Carrie Chapman Catt’s more conservative National American Woman's Suffrage Association and co-found the National Woman's Party (NWP), which argued fervently for a national suffrage amendment. The NWP organized high-profile parades and famously picketed in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House. The jailed suffragists, including Alice, staged hunger strikes and suffered horrendously from forced feedings. Their story is dramatized in the 2004 film, Iron Jawed Angels. Alice Paul was 25 years old when women won the vote in 1920.

After the 19th Amendment passed, Paul turned her sight on another, launching a decades-long campaign for constitutionally protected gender equality, believing women’s rights could neither be guaranteed nor protected unless written in the U.S. Constitution. In 1923, she drafted the first version of an Equal Rights Amendment. It would undergo many revisions, not all to her satisfaction, and finally passed out of Congress in 1972. Rallying against a new wave of cultural opposition in the 1970s and 80s, the ERA failed to achieve final ratification and to this day, remains unadopted. 

It’s up to us to finish this fight. During your League’s 2020 celebrations, consider addressing the urgency of ERA in honor of Alice Paul, with a public viewing of the Legalize Equality DVD.  Our fight for gender equality is not over and, in the words of Alice Paul (1923 Seneca Falls), “We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government.”

.