The Life of Alice Paul was a good one. Her parents, Tacie and William Paul, were Quakers and taught Alice valuable life lessons. From a young age they told her that gender equality was the right way to go about things. Her younger siblings were William, Helen, and Parry. Her being an older sibling most likely also contributed to her leadership skills.
Alice was always the brightest pupil. She graduated first in her class of 1901 at a Hicksite school. Alice Paul’s grandfather, Judge William Parry, was one of the founders at Swarthmore College. His daughter (Alice’s mother) went there but dropped out to marry William Paul. All of Alice’s siblings and herself, attended Swarthmore College, but only she finished and got a degree in Biology. Alice soon went to England and there she was transformed into a militant suffragist. There she met Christabel Pankhurst. She was a radical suffragette, as well as her mother and sister. She smashed more than forty-eight windows (mentioned in one interview). She was arrested many times as well as being imprisoned. While in imprisonment, she went on hunger strikes, which resulted in her being brutally force fed. Once she was out of prison, she went back to America to help. Alice soon enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. There she the NAWSA (National American Women’s Suffrage Association. She was appointed as the head on the Congressional Committee. She was in charge of working for a federal suffrage amendment. She helped set up an enormous parade by women to march down Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately many males watching the parade attacked the suffragist. Things soon got violent, yet the police didn’t step in. The only bright side was that this go the attention they were hoping for. Things is the NAWSA weren’t working out for Alice so she made her own group called the National Women’s Party (NWP). They were constantly picketing the White House, but a this time the President didn’t mind as much. However once WWI broke out the women continued to picket the White House. The people considered this “unpatriotic”. The ladies were attacked by angry mobs constantly. One day were arrested for “obstructing traffic”. When they didn’t pay the fine, they were all sent to jail. The ladies who had been arrested were sent to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. They did as Alice had done in England, and went on a hunger strike and demanded to be treated as political prisoners. The prison, however, only answered their demands with brutality. They even hurt older women. They were beaten and pushed into disgusting cells. More and more women got arrested and the prison only got worse. The women were soon force fed in a horrible method. Prison officials wanted to make Alice look insane, this however didn’t work. Fortunately, someone caught word of the terrible way the women were being treated and it spread. People soon pitied the women and demanded they be free. This brought a lot of support to women’s suffrage. At last all of the women’s hard work paid off and the 19th amendment was passed on August 18, 1920. |