Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign

Katherine H Adams, Michael L Keene

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252074714, 9780252032202
• eBook ISBN: 9780252090349
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Past biographies, histories, and government documents have ignored Alice Paul's contribution to the women's suffrage movement, but this groundbreaking study scrupulously fills the gap in the historical record. Masterfully framed by an analysis of Paul's nonviolent and visual rhetorical strategies, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign narrates the remarkable story of the first person to picket the White House, the first to attempt a national political boycott, the first to burn the president in effigy, and the first to lead a successful campaign of nonviolence.

Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene also chronicle other dramatic techniques that Paul deftly used to gain publicity for the suffrage movement. Stunningly woven into the narrative are accounts of many instances in which women were in physical danger. Rather than avoid discussion of Paul's imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding, the authors divulge the strategies she employed in her campaign. Paul's controversial approach, the authors assert, was essential in changing American attitudes toward suffrage.

1. Alice Paul’s Formation as Activist

In December of 1912, Alice Paul boarded a train in Philadelphia to move to Washington, D.C. She was on her way there to represent the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Congress as chair of its Congressional Committee and thus as its official advocate of a federal suffrage amendment. At age twenty-seven, she went alone, with no place secured either to live or to work, and with a ten-dollar budget from NAWSA and an agreement that she would not ask for more. The association had been loath to trust her with this job; only Jane Addams’s argument for her selection had curbed President Anna Howard Shaw’s objections to this too young and too militant woman who had been jailed in England with the Pankhursts. (One contemporary journalist commented on this hesitancy, “Above all, Dr. Shaw wanted no wildness in her ranks” [Faber 126].) Starting that December, at a time when the suffrage effort was in a stagnant period following the deaths of leaders Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, and the failure of many state campaigns, Paul began to mount her own nonviolent campaign, one involving a visual rhetoric shaped by her Quaker upbringing, her extensive education, and her suffrage experience in England.

Alice Paul’s Quaker Roots

Alice Stokes Paul traced her background on both sides to Quakers who had worked for governmental reform. “I have practically no ancestor who wasn’t a Quaker,” she declared in a 1972/1973 interview with oral historian Amelia Fry: “My father and mother were, and their fathers and mothers were.” On her mother’s side, one English ancestor was William Crispin, who helped William Penn with plans for a Quaker colony in the new world (Dunn and Dunn 47). On her father’s side, Hannah Feake became a Quaker minister and married fellow Quaker John Bowne of New York in 1656. Hearing that the Bownes were holding Quaker meetings in their home, Governor Stuyvesant had John arrested and banished to Holland, where he was able to convince the Estates General to force an end to this interference with religious freedom; Hannah conducted secret meetings during his absence and later worked with her husband to involve others in their faith (Flushing Remonstrance).

By the time of Alice Paul’s birth, her staunchly Quaker family, proud of its activist past, had been in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for many generations. She was born on January 11, 1885, in Moorestown, New Jersey, a Quaker village in Burlington County about fourteen miles from Philadelphia across the Delaware River. Her father, William M. Paul, owned a large farm there and was president of the Burlington County Trust Company. As a farmer and banker, he adhered to long traditions within the Society of Friends, who in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England had often combined farm income with business employment because they could not take government jobs or pursue a university education to support their families (Vipont 146–47). During Paul’s childhood, Moorestown had two congregations or “meetings,” one for the more traditional, rural, and separatist Hicksite group and one for the more modern and urban Orthodox group. As a family of farmers and traditional Quakers, the Pauls were Hicksites, putting emphasis on inner strength, a separate community, and quietism, a calm and reserved approach to everyday life.

As confirmed Hicksites living in a Quaker village, the Pauls followed Quaker traditions in their home, community life, and educational choices. Like their neighbors, they dressed plainly, used thee and thou in their speech, and had no music in their home. The family went to the local Hicksite meeting each Sunday, and the children attended the Hicksite Friends school on Chester Avenue, which had built a new brick building in 1880 and opened the area’s first kindergarten in 1883. This thriving school encouraged serious habits of reading and reflection, which led Paul to the library the school shared with the meeting: “And I read just endlessly, ceaselessly, almost every book it seems! We had a Friends library there in the meeting house, and I took out every book in the library” (Fry).

In this small world of home, school, and meeting, Paul was imbued with the tenets of the Quaker faith. The Society had begun in England over two hundred years earlier when George Fox, in 1647, began preaching the doctrine of “Christ within” or “inner light.” Fox traveled throughout England, forming small groups that chose to abandon traditional forms of worship and concentrate on “the pure knowledge of God and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book or writing.” These groups vested power not in clergy, religious rituals, or stories of the historical Jesus, but in personal experience of the Holy Spirit or the inner light, a transforming form of communion that silent reflection made possible (Faith and Practice 1).

At the earliest meetings of Fox’s adherents, as in the Moorestown meeting Paul’s family attended, members were encouraged to make the choice of a “testimony” or reform goal, which George Fox described in 1656 as being “valiant for the Truth upon earth” (Faith and Practice 7). To follow the true path of Jesus, members would endeavor to improve the lives of their fellows, changing the temporal world by their work for social justice. The Quaker testimony thus provided “a way of redeeming the world,” not “a ladder for climbing out of it” (W. R. Miller 27). In this quest for justice, the means would be every bit as crucial as the end. For Quakers, the one right means was “witnessing,” as Fox defined it: “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them” (Faith and Practice 7). Real change, Fox advised, would be accomplished not by arguing, intimidating, or controlling. Instead, the Quaker’s actions would serve as an example on which others might focus their own inner light and energy. “Being-with-others” through daily work—in an urban neighborhood, for example, or in a clinic, business, or home—would demonstrate respect and provide help while enabling a group to plan larger efforts that would reap larger benefits.

This Quaker emphasis on service and a serious life purpose influenced all of Paul’s siblings. Alice was the oldest of four children. Her younger sister Helen graduated from Wellesley, where she became a “student volunteer,” a member of an organization that trained young people for foreign service. After graduation, she attempted to join a group of missionaries headed to China, following a Quaker path forged by Robert John Davidson and Mary J. Davidson in 1886, but she was too young (Vipont 214–15). Instead, she went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study in Chinese to further prepare herself for a trip abroad. But while she was at the university, she became interested in Christian Science and eventually founded a Christian Science church in Moorestown. The younger of Paul’s brothers, Parry, went to the University of Wisconsin to study engineering and then joined the Friends Service Committee to teach the use of tractors to the Russians, participating in a tradition of Friends’ activism in Russia that had begun when Quakers William Allen and Stephen Grellet traveled there in 1818 to work in educational and agricultural reform movements (Vipont 194). Only brother William missed this dedication to religious reform and instead served community and family needs. After studying at Rutgers College and the Cornell School of Agriculture, he inherited part of his father’s farmland and served on the board of directors of the bank, taking over management of the family’s financial interests after his father’s death, a more restricted but still crucial form of Quaker service.

Besides asking for a commitment to a testimony and to witnessing, the Quaker tradition, as established by Fox and his wife Margaret Fell and practiced by the Pauls, included a commitment to women’s equality. At sessions held every two weeks in most congregations, women discussed church accounts and records, philanthropic efforts, and the proper behavior of members. Quakers believed this organizational structure encouraged women’s rhetorical openness and activism and thus expanded their influence in the larger group. Women also became traveling ministers, going out to faraway sites to interact with established groups and to form new meetings, often at great physical risk. These traveling ministers joined in the silent services and met with members afterwards, generally to offer organizational help and to share their personal commitments rather than to formally preach or lecture (Bacon, Mothers of Feminism 7, 23).

This women’s rights tradition within Quakerism, so influential to Alice Paul, had flourished in the United States from the colonial period. In 1656, Englishwomen Mary Fisher and Ann Austin landed in Boston, and Elizabeth Harris traveled to Virginia to share the Quaker message. Throughout the eighteenth century, women from the colonies traveled to Europe, taking great risks to interact with other Quakers. Susanna Morris of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, made three trips to England, during which she was shipwrecked three times. Charity Cook, Sarah Harrison, and Mary Swett went to prison in Friedberg, Germany, in 1798, for attempting to hold a Quaker meeting there (Bacon, Mothers of Feminism 37). These women left home alone and in groups, with men and without, with a “traveling minute” or authorization from their local meetings.

Although most Quaker women married, singleness did not carry a negative connotation for Quaker women involved in service and reform. Unmarried Quakers were well represented among women activists, social workers, doctors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. In 1895 Lillian Wald established the Nurses’ Settlement house at 225 Henry Street in New York City (Stoneburner 46–47). In the same time period, Anna Elizabeth Broomall worked as an obstetrician and medical educator; Mary Elizabeth Garrett endowed colleges that, frequently under pressure as at Johns Hopkins Medical School, provided education opportunities for women as well as men; M. Carey Thomas served as president of Bryn Mawr College; and Grace Abbott helped administrate the federal Children’s Bureau and became a specialist in child labor law.

Swarthmore

By the time Alice Paul finished high school, she had become attracted to the choice of a single life imbued with a meaningful testimony that would improve women’s lives, but finding a more specific goal and means would take several years. At age sixteen, in 1901, she enrolled at Swarthmore College, a Quaker school that her mother’s father had helped to found and that her mother, Tacie Parry Paul, attended before her marriage. It was named for Margaret Fell’s home in England, which had served as a meeting spot for the Society’s earliest members.

Philadelphia Hicksite Friends founded the college in 1869 as one of the first to offer equal educational opportunities to men and women (Walton 4–5). From its beginning, the school endeavored to isolate young Quakers from the outside world, providing a setting where they could develop their own inner light (Enion 74). Its founders felt that this combination of a separate space and a rigorous education would prepare graduates to form testimonies that would help shape their nation. The school especially stressed science education to equip students with the tools for contributing to an industrializing America, a more modern and practical approach to undergraduate education than was occurring in many older private colleges. From its beginning, Swarthmore continued to grow and build, from eighty-two students in 1880 to 163 in 1890, while maintaining the small average class size (of just 10.5) that enabled students to interact with the faculty and their classmates and thus forge their own meaningful futures (Walton 13; Enion 82). In Paul’s sophomore year, the school initiated a particularly noteworthy period of formation when Joseph Swain from Indiana University became its president, hired more and better faculty members, launched a building program, and further enlarged the student body.

While Alice Paul attended this Quaker college, she considered several choices that might define her future. Paul chose biology for her major because this subject provided an intellectual challenge, but she did not find her answer by studying biology. Like most other women students of the time, she then imagined that her calling might be teaching, making a difference by modeling positive values and intellectual discipline for young people. In fact, most female Swarthmore graduates, whatever their major, worked as teachers, at least until they married and had children: “over 80 percent of the women graduates and about 7 percent of the men from 1869–89” chose this path (Enion 79–80). But Paul viewed this career as filled with the daily frustrations of repetitive lessons, uninspired pupils, and intellectual loneliness; she was not convinced that her involvement in this profession could lead to any real change in society. She thought that teaching might have to be her future, but she felt less than thrilled at the prospect.

During her senior year, Professor Robert Clarkson Brooks sent her in a new direction—into the service work that also inspired Helen and Parry Paul. Brooks, one of the new hires made by President Swain, taught a seminar-style course in political science and economics that offered her “a great joy” during that year (Fry). Then thirty years old, Brooks had finished his dissertation at Cornell University the year before and was involved in sociological research on urban life. His publications included an 1890 study of the age of marriage in slums and nonslums, research that concentrated on the effect of poverty on a woman’s choices. In his senior seminars, he established a close group that he expected to question America’s received truths about class and gender, following a tradition of advanced work which, as Brooks wrote, Joseph Swain was trying to establish across campus: “Even for a small college there was close contact and cordial good feeling to an unusual degree between instructors and students, especially in advanced courses. Most important of all, the faculty was by no means satisfied by the progress already achieved, and individual experiments with groups of five or six advanced students, somewhat similar to honors work, were being made in several departments” (Walton 29).

At the end of the year, Brooks helped Paul to avoid the teaching profession and establish her own path of activism by nominating her for a fellowship from the College Settlement Association of America. Paul thus spent 1905–1906 at a settlement located at 95 Rivington Street in New York City. The College Settlement Association had been founded in 1887 by graduates of Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley, including Jean Fine, Helen Rand, and Vida Scudder. Within a few years, women from Swarthmore, Radcliffe, Brooklyn’s Packer Institute, and Barnard had become residents at settlement houses in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. To provide “uplifting influences” in the slums of New York as in the other cities, these college graduates established homes that could serve as meeting centers for local residents, especially young working women and mothers. These women were divided up into “clubs” and given instruction in homemaking skills, in the arts of singing, gymnastics, and dancing, and in high school subjects (Garbus).

From Rivington Street to Woodbrooke

What Paul found appealing at Rivington Street was the actual interaction—the opportunity for Quaker witnessing—that the work entailed. But a year there made clear to her the limitations of such philanthropy. “I knew in a very short time I was never going to be a social worker,” she later recalled, “because I could see that social workers were not doing much good in the world . . . you knew you couldn’t change the situation by social work” (Fry). She began viewing such charitable involvements as a stopgap that did not alter inequities and that, in fact, might be viewed as participation in a corrupt system. As a Quaker seeking her own testimony, she wanted to participate in changing the system, not just ameliorating or masking its worst results.

As Paul would do throughout her life, she immediately sought the education that could further elucidate the problems of the practical work on which she had embarked. When she began settlement work, she also enrolled in the School of Philanthropy, now the School of Social Work, at Columbia University, a certificate program from which she graduated in 1906. Then, not only to learn practical techniques of working with the poor but instead to study the institutional structures that created their plight, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1906. Studying political science, sociology, and economics, she received a master’s degree in the fall of 1907.

After completing these two graduate programs, Paul sought more training in the Quaker path of activism. She applied for a scholarship to the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in England, where she enrolled in the fall of 1907. Woodbrooke, the former home of Sir George Cadbury, had become a Quaker center in 1903. Its founders felt that, as young Friends secured an education to enter professions, they were abandoning the traditional commitment to a personal testimony and thus to activism. John Willem Rowntree, one of these founders, expected this school to answer a key question for the future: “How can we maintain a free ministry among busy men who feel the exacting toll of increasing commercial competition?” (Wood, “Origins” 17).

When Paul attended in 1907, Woodbrooke had forty-one students of different ages and nationalities. The group, of whom over a third were women, had silent devotion each morning, then lectures and community-forming games. The short courses, without exams or elaborate syllabi, covered Quaker history and the Bible; current laws, economic trends, and moral codes that a Quaker might be required to analyze and change; and the best practical means of enabling that change. The Director of Studies, Rufus Harris, “was resolved that Woodbrooke should not be an introverted Quaker institution” but a place from which new, influential styles of living would emanate (Wood, “First Director of Studies” 29).

While Paul was at Woodbrooke furthering her knowledge of Quaker approaches to social activism, she took courses at the University of Birmingham to continue her study of the social sciences. During 1908 and 1909 she also attended the School of Economics in London. There, Paul heard lectures by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who had started the school in 1894 to further the Fabian Society’s “evolutionary rather than revolutionary” approach to socialism (Radice 56). Sydney Webb had been conducting research and was giving lectures on the inequality of wages in England; Beatrice Webb had been studying women’s plight in factory sweatshops and was then a member of a Royal Commission formed to revise the 1834 Poor Law, work that she discussed frequently with students. Echoing a conclusion that Paul had made on Rivington Street, Beatrice Webb declared that she wanted “to stem the tide of philanthropic impulse” and focus attention instead on the social change possible only through equal legal status for all citizens (Radice 161).

At the London School, Paul also studied with Edward Westermarck, a Dutch anthropologist whose The History of Human Marriage (1891) and The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (2 vols., 1908 and 1912) focused on the temporal and need-based nature of supposedly fixed cultural values. Concerning marriage, for example, he demonstrated the variability of rules governing the appropriate age, the approved number of wives, the significance of promiscuity, and the stigma of separation or divorce. In his books and class lectures, he also examined the disparity among accepted definitions of a good or desirable woman. He argued that in some primitive cultures women were ceded more respect for their intellectual and physical abilities than were women in civilized cultures, in which the decreased need for women’s labor had led to desirability being vested in “a slight, dainty, and relatively feeble creature.” His analysis especially concentrated on the Victorian vision of a silent woman sitting pristinely in a well-appointed drawing room: delicate beauty, he argued, was the main signifier of her marital and even her moral superiority. In examining changing expectations for women, Westermarck noted that “in every society the traditional notions as to what is good or bad, obligatory or indifferent, are commonly accepted by the mass of people without further reflection.” But a “scrutinising and enlightened judge,” what Paul herself was endeavoring to become, could analyze and reject social mores since they were not eternal or god-given values even if they seemed so to the unquestioning majority (History of Human Marriage 661).

While she was taking classes at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, and the London School of Economics, Paul returned to social work because it provided a place to stay and an income, but these experiences only confirmed the misgivings she had at Rivington Street. She first liv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Alice Paul’s Formation as Activist
• 2. The Commitment to Nonviolence
• 3. Reaching the Group through Words and Pictures
• 4. Parades and Other Events: Escalating the Nonviolent Pressure
• 5. Lobbying and Deputations
• 6. The Political Boycott
• 7. Picketing Wilson
• 8. Hunger Strikes and Jail
• 9. At Nonviolent War
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index