Alice Paul was unapologetic, militant and known for founding America’s pro-suffrage National Woman’s Party. But what many people don’t realize is that Paul fought for votes for women in both the United States and Britain—and often paid a brutal physical price for her convictions.
Like many other suffragists, Paul became politicized while working in New York’s settlement houses. As she helped poor turn-of-the-century families, the new college graduate realized that injustice permeated American society—and realized that social work wasn’t for her. “You couldn’t change the situation by social work,” she recalled later.
But when Paul spent time in England doing graduate work in sociology, she met a group of women who were changing their situation. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were the leaders of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, which brought a particularly compelling and dramatic form of political agitation to the UK. Together with the Pankhursts, a radicalized Paul marched, protested, and was arrested multiple times.
In prison, she participated in hunger strikes and was force fed. But that didn’t deter her. Instead, she returned to the United States to recover physically and make plans for furthering suffrage in the United States. She decided to focus her efforts on the inauguration of the new president, Woodrow Wilson, organizing a parade that drew more than half a million viewers and that produced almost riotous conditions. Paul and her fellow marchers ended up having to rely on a human shield formed by a Maryland college as national guard troops controlled the chaos.
But though Paul got lots of publicity, she wasn’t able to convince Wilson to support suffrage. Then she came up with what would be one of the most visible and polarizing tactics employed by American suffragists—what became known as Silent Sentinels. A group of women posted themselves at the gates of the White House with banners demanding that Wilson support suffrage. But as their messages became more political and World War I more important to American civilians, the protestors found themselves in physical danger as they protested in silence. They were regularly taunted, attacked, and threatened by passers-by, and repeatedly arrested for minor offenses like obstructing traffic.
In October 1917, Paul was arrested after holding up a banner that quoted the President himself. She was thrown in Occoquan Workhouse, where so many other suffragists served time for their protests. She was placed in solitary confinement and made so weak from a diet of bread and water that she was placed in the hospital. But in the hospital, she refused food. So officials force-fed her liquids like raw eggs and milk with a tube they shoved down her throat. News of the force feedings and rumors that the protestors had been beaten and brutalized created a public outcry, and Paul was finally released after five weeks in prison.
Though it took three more years for Paul’s dream of women’s suffrage to come true, her steely resolve was a model of non-violent protest that effectively raised awareness and support for an unpopular cause. When asked why she had spent her life fighting for women’s rights, she replied characteristically with a quote of her mother’s: “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.”
