We don’t’ hear
about Alice Paul. When we think of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United
States we think of Susan B. Anthony or Carrie Catt. When I asked for books on
Alice Paul I found only one and it was a little know history book long
forgotten. She predated Martin Luther King by fifty years, but she was the
first to use nonviolence in America as a means to augment social change.
Alice Paul, because of her extreme tactics of
confrontation and the truths she
revealed about our police, our penal system, and President Woodrow Wilson, was
treated as a non-person after the nineteenth amendment passed giving women the
right to vote in the United States. But the truth
is Alice Paul forced President Woodrow Wilson and the United States government
to pass the nineteenth amendment giving
women the right to vote through demonstrations, hunger strikes, imprisonment,
burnings, threats, and an unrelenting
campaign that could only be termed as
modern terrorism against a recalcitrant government.
Most people
associate the suffragette movement with pictures of Victorian women marching in
parades with banners across their shoulders. The reality is the government of
the United States had no intention of giving women the right to vote when
Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912. The only way to make a world of men
recognize the injustice of not giving women an equal say in a democracy was to
put the issue of women’s suffrage front and center.
It was
through the radical tactics of one woman, Alice Paul, that President Wilson and
the government had to finally capitulate and pass the nineteenth amendment in
1920 giving women the right to vote. But this came at a very high price and
Alice Paul would be imprisoned, beaten, harassed, threatened, committed to an
insane asylum, and force fed in a brutal manner after hunger strikes that left
her unable to get out of her bed.
She would lay
siege to the White House for four years with daily demonstrations outside the
gates, chaining’s, burning of Wilson in effigy, arrests, beatings, and finally
the unrelenting imprisonment and hunger strike that forced Wilson to pardon her
and then her refusal to leave prison where the dreaded force feedings began
again.
She understood that change only came through creating dis-ease in the powers that be. Something the Womens March will attempt to do on Saturday.
