How One Woman Forced the United States to Give Women THE VOTE

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. 

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

What You Don't Know About The First Madam President

She was from the South. Her name was Edith Bolling Wilson and married President Woodrow Wilson after his wife Ellen Wilson died. They were only married four years and then Woodrow had a massive stroke and Edith took over the White House. This was in 1919 and from here on Edith Wilson ran the government until 1921. She had only two years of school and had run a successful jewelry company after her first husband died. She owned one of the first electric cars in Washington and was given the first drivers license in the District of Columbia. She was fifteen years younger than Woodrow Wilson and considered very attractive. 

They necked in the presidential limousine when they were courting. Edith deciphered top secret codes for the President. When he had a stroke she controlled who saw him and who didn't.  She oversaw legislation and secured appointments for his cabinet. All this while her husband was on deaths door and many thought he would die. She saw the Vice President only once and told him his services weren't needed. She oversaw the end of World War I and was in the middle of the fight to get the United States into the League of Nations. 

She would show her husband movies and wheel him outside to the South Portico for air. She had him put in the presidential limousine and propped up so people would know he was still alive. She outlived him by forty years and was at John Kennedy's inauguration. She wrote a memoir in 1939 and denied running the White House. In the National Archives are correspondence that was never opened during her Presidency and discovered in the 1950s. She just couldn't get to it. 

She was our first woman President and has never been recognized for her service to the country.


Order from Barnes and Noble Madam President

What You Don't Know About The First Madam President

She was from the South. Her name was Edith Bolling Wilson and married President Woodrow Wilson after his wife Ellen Wilson died. They were only married four years and then Woodrow had a massive stroke and Edith took over the White House. This was in 1919 and from here on Edith Wilson ran the government until 1921. She had only two years of school and had run a successful jewelry company after her first husband died. She owned one of the first electric cars in Washington and was given the first drivers license in the District of Columbia. She was fifteen years younger than Woodrow Wilson and considered very attractive. 

They necked in the presidential limousine when they were courting. Edith deciphered top secret codes for the President. When he had a stroke she controlled who saw him and who didn't.  She oversaw legislation and secured appointments for his cabinet. All this while her husband was on deaths door and many thought he would die. She saw the Vice President only once and told him his services weren't needed. She oversaw the end of World War I and was in the middle of the fight to get the United States into the League of Nations. 

She would show her husband movies and wheel him outside to the South Portico for air. She had him put in the presidential limousine and propped up so people would know he was still alive. She outlived him by forty years and was at John Kennedy's inauguration. She wrote a memoir in 1939 and denied running the White House. In the National Archives are correspondence that was never opened during her Presidency and discovered in the 1950s. She just couldn't get to it. 

She was our first woman President and has never been recognized for her service to the country.

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Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson