American suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977) was born into a prominent Quaker family in New Jersey. While attending a training school in England, she became active with the country’s radical suffragists. After two years with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she cofounded the Congressional Union and then formed the National Woman’s party in 1916. Drawing on her experience, Paul led demonstrations and was subjected to imprisonment as she sought a voting amendment, but her actions helped bring about the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul continued to push for equal rights and worked from National Woman’s party headquarters in Washington, D.C., until her later years.
Born into a Quaker family in Moorestown, New Jersey, Paul was raised in an intellectual and religious environment. Her forebears included on her mother’s side William Penn and on her father’s side the Winthrops of Massachusetts; her maternal grandfather was one of the founders of Swarthmore College. Paul graduated from Swarthmore in 1905 and then attended the New York School of Philanthropy (later Columbia University School of Social Work), the University of Pennsylvania, and a training school for Quakers in Woodbridge, England. She remained in England from 1907 to 1910.
It was during those years that Paul, while studying and working as a case worker for a London settlement house, served her apprenticeship for what became her vocation: the struggle for women’s rights. She was enlisted by England’s militant suffragists Emmeline and Christobel Pankhurst. Her education as an activist was acquired through a series of arrests, imprisonments, hunger strikes, and forced feedings. She learned how to generate publicity for the cause and how to capitalize on that publicity.
