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Seize the Vote.
Here is a new design for Alice Paul.
The first thing I want to say about Alice Paul is that she was not an intersectional feminist. She believed that the problems of Black women were caused by racism, which she thought was a separate struggle, and Alice’s strategy did not include foregrounding the liberation of Black women. She thought that full inclusion of Black women in suffrage activities would alienate the white women in the South and she decided that it was more important to unify white women than to fully include ALL women. She thereby lost the chance to use the full power and voice of Black women to further the cause of women’s rights, and missed the opportunity to amplify Black women’s voices. We now know that this was the wrong thing to do. It is always the right thing to listen to Black women and amplify their voices. I am glad to say that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, another perSISTER I celebrate (coming soon!), refused to be segregated during the great women’s suffrage procession of March 3, 1913 (organized by Alice Paul and others). She insisted on walking with her group from Chicago, even though the Illinois delegation forbade it. Ida’s resolve had to be twice as strong for her to march there, then.
(Still, on this Library of Congress page highlighting some of the women arrested and imprisoned for their role in suffrage protests, you can see several African American women: https://www.loc.gov/collections/women-of-protest/articles-and-essays/gallery-of-suffrage-prisoners/)
Alice Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, women’s rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists during the final rounds of the multi-generational fight for women’s right to vote in the U.S. Her militant and confrontational tactics were vital in the success of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote.
The battle for the vote was long and tangled and powered by different groups approaching the problem from different angles, while not really getting along. Alice Paul was quite literally written out of the history because the history was written by more genteel factions. Also, she didn’t like to seek attention for herself personally. Only lately has Alice been acknowledged for her vital role in this struggle. We are more ready to accept militant women now.
Alice Paul was brilliant and highly educated, earning many degrees, including a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1910, and a doctorate in Civil Law from American University in 1928. But it was while she was in England that she gained her most life-changing education.
Basically, she learned that the human misery she had seen during her settlement house work (in the U.S.) could not be fixed through social work, because it was created by deep systems of oppression. She realized that social change required equal legal status for women. She took up with the English women’s suffrage movement and learned to Disobey: she was willing to risk physical harm while confronting powerful men at public events and then gaining public sympathy when she was beaten and hauled off to jail. It was shocking to the public to see women treated this way. She also learned to demand to be treated as a political prisoner upon arrest. Hunger strikes were another tactic, and then educating the public about the torture of forced-feeding. Alice was arrested seven times and imprisoned three times during her English sojourn. Her health damaged, she returned to the U.S. in 1910 to recover and do suffrage work back home.
In the U.S., Alice and her comrade Lucy Burns (a suffrage activist she had met in jail in England—also an American) created the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and used comparatively tamer tactics than they had in England. Their six-day-a-week silent picketing in front of the White House is their most famous activity and it turned out to be highly effective. Members of the group also suffered from police and prison brutality, culminating on November 14, 1917 in the “Night of Terror” which was a turning point in the suffrage struggle. The imprisoned women were beaten and tortured and the brutality and misogyny shocked people.
There are so many interesting things that happened and a lot of places to read about this, and there’s just not enough space to tell the story here. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote
See:
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/alice-paul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Paul
Having won passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, in 1923 Alice Paul wrote the text of the Equal Rights Amendment, which has still not become part of our constitution. Astonishingly, Alice Paul survived until 1977, well into the flowering of second wave feminism. Besides being the year that Alice died, 1977 was the year that the momentum behind ERA ratification fell apart. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1977-conference-womens-rights-split-america-two-180962174/)
DESIGN NOTE
I first became interested in Alice Paul this year (2022) when I was reading 111 Places in Women’s History in Washington DC That You Must Not Miss. The authors mention that the National Museum of American History has in its collection a charm bracelet that belonged to Alice Paul. As the states ratified the ERA, she added the state charm to her bracelet. There are actually 4 bracelets because all the states didn’t fit on one. An Ohio state charm dated 2/7/74 was the last one that she added, the 33rd, just before she suffered a stroke. Only 35 of the required 38 states ratified the ERA before the 1982 deadline.
(https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search?return_all=1&edan_local=1&edan_q=alice%20paul%20bracelets&)
This struck me, how physical this token is. Then as I was learning about Alice in developing this print I saw how this gift for the physical symbol and for theater was deployed in all of Alice’s work. No other perSISTER so far has offered me so many visual elements to work with—truly a gift to archives as well. She was a master of visual rhetoric:
– The NWP flag colors are Gold, White, and Violet: Give Women the Vote (influenced by the British suffrage flag that was green, white, and violet).
– Alice made a huge NWP flag with space for 36 stars, one for each state required to ratify the 19th amendment. She would sew on a new star as states ratified. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016827559/?loclr=blogflt
– Special pins and medals were given to women who had been jailed for the cause, with add-ons for hunger strikers. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/womens-suffrage-jail-pins-protest
– The silent picketers themselves were powerful theater, and their banners are important relics.
– The 1913 suffrage procession: the woman on the white horse, the gorgeous printed program, the floats, the insistence on marching up Pennsylvania Ave, the timing to be the day before Wilson’s inauguration.
– WOMEN driving (!) through the heartland of America asking women to sign the suffrage petition.
– There are many, many, photographs from the Alice Paul suffrage movement era.
Here is a photo of Alice toasting her completed flag. https://whyy.org/episodes/alice-paul/
More Resources
https://www.nps.gov/articles/symbols-of-the-women-s-suffrage-movement.htm
Based on a photo of Alice Paul by Harris & Ewing in the Library of Congress
The texture background in this print is from vecteezy.com
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