Alice Paul: Intellectual History of a Pioneer

Alice Paul: Her Story As A Suffragette, 1907-1910
From a Master’s thesis at Oxford University
by Trista di Genova
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SECTION 1
Reflecting on Alice Paul

Existing research on Alice Paul focuses mostly on her activities and achievements in the United States. Bref, after 1910, Alice Paul finished a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (1912), took over the practically defunct Congressional Union (CU) of the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and mobilized the largest suffrage procession in history in Washington, DC in 1913. She founded the National Woman’s Party (NWP) with Lucy Burns in 1915, and tirelessly lobbied Congress on the question of “woman suffrage” until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919. By 1917, she had picketed the White House, was imprisoned, went on hunger strike, and was again force-fed in prison. She finished two law degrees, one from from the Washington College of Law (1922), then another law degree and another doctorate from American University (1928). Then she wrote the text for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and for the rest of her life she campaigned passionately for the ERA’s full passage and ratification.

Little has been known about Alice Paul’s experience in Britain and Europe during 1907-1910, a key period in her intellectual development as the future leader of the American suffrage movement. Some analyses of the American suffrage movement relate a few details about Alice Paul during this time period: that she was a graduate student; that she was imprisoned or did hunger strikes. After searching the Internet for all references to Alice Paul, her experience in the United Kingdom is either completely left out, or briefly referred to as where she “learned militant tactics” from the Pankhursts.

What research resources do we have that indicate what really happened during this period? We know that Alice Paul did indeed write prolifically, from the collections of NWP-related papers she deposited in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress. Then, there is access to, but no academic discussion of, her academic writings as yet. Personal letters that she wrote have, at least until now, been largely absent, or at least unknown.

Miss Paul rarely gave personal interviews. As Inez Haynes Irwin wrote: “She is absolutely concentrated on now….Both these young women [Alice Paul and Lucy Burns] remember their English experiences in flashes and pictures. They worked too hard and too militantly to keep any written record; and successive hardships wiped away all traces of their predecessors.” (Irwin, 1964: 7)
In 1974, Amelia Fry carried out the most extensive interview of Alice Paul about her life, published through the 1974 Suffragists Oral History Project at U.C. Berkeley. As yet, however, there is still no official biography written about her life, let alone details about this very critical yet un-studied sequence of events.

Enter the Letters
In 2001, after publishing some initial investigations about Alice Paul on the Internet, the director of the Alice Paul Foundation (APF) assisted by providing a research copy of some letters written by Alice Paul while she was in Germany, England and Scotland. Ms. Beard relates the story of how they appeared: a male relative inherited the effects of Miss Paul’s estate, and he decided to sell it all off at auction in 1987. Fortunately, the APF heard about this and seized the opportunity to acquire them. They raised $35,000 and “whatever it took” from other donors, and they succeeded in buying everything for $30,000 at auction The APF donated much of this collection, including thirty one letters written by Alice Paul, to the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, and the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The appearance of these letters is good news for would-be biographers and women’s “herstorians.” Their existence was unbeknownst even to Ms. Fry, Alice Paul’s official biographer, who believed Alice Paul’s personal letters had been burned. Fry reported in a 2002 interview that a woman family member had some of Alice Paul’s private letters, decided to respect Miss Paul’s privacy by not publishing them, and had “burned them all.” Stories differ, but these effectively are the only personal letters written by Alice Paul in existence.

Although some letters are missing, particularly overall these letters help fill in many gaps in the research about the life of this enormously influential second wave suffrage leader. They not only describe her experiences in England for the first time, they show the more human and private side of her life, a very complicated life that contradicts one journalists’ comment that [Alice Paul was nothing more than the ERA]. The real problem may have been that we had little information about such a complex and dynamic life.
The intent of this paper is to do ethnographic about Alice Paul during this period that will fill in some gaps about Alice Paul’s intellectual development, and activities. Existing research is used, notably the 1974 Fry interview with Alice Paul, and academic and historical discussion about the life of Alice Paul. New research has been sought, through Quaker archives, newspaper clippings of the time, police reports and various online resources concerning the Suffrage movement in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

In analyzing these texts, the objective is threefold: 1) develop the social/historical context surrounding Alice Paul’s life and observations at this time; 2) evaluate and discuss the intellectual history and formation of an American Suffragette/her motivation; and 3) compare and analyse her strategies and development as a nonviolent women’s rights leader, not only noting how some of these strategies impacted the American suffrage movement, but looking at their earlier origins.

Alice’s Personal Demeanor
A contemporary describes Alice Paul’s as:

a “slender, frail-looking young woman, delicately colored and delicately made…Her face has a kind of powerful irregularity. Its prevailing expression is of a brooding stillness; yet when she smiles, dimples appear. Her eyes are big and quiet; dark – like moss-agates. When she is silent they are almost opaque. When she talks they light up – rather they glow– in a notable degree of luminosity. Her voice is low; musical; it pulsates with a kind of interrogative plaintiveness. When you ask here a question, there ensues, on her part, a stillness so profound, you can almost hear it. I think I have never seen anybody who can keep so still as Alice Paul. But when she answers you, the lucidity of exposition, the directness of expression! Always she looks you straight in the eye, and when she has finished speakig she holds you with that luminous glow. Her tiny hands make gestures, almost humorous in their gentleness and futility, compared with the force of her remarks… she has the quiet of a spinning top.”

Other contemporaries described her in Inez Haynes Irwin’s Up Hill With Banners Flying (1964). Helena Hill Weed attributes a ‘prescience’ to her. Ann Martin says “Her mind moves with the precision of a beautiful machine.” Nina Allender sums her up as “a Napoleon without self-indulgence,” and “my mother describes here as a flame undyingly burning.”

Lucy Burns later description of her shows some of the qualities she both retained and developed:

“When Alice Paul spoke to me about the federal work, I knew that she had an extraordinary mind, extraordinary courage and remarkable executive ability. But I felt she had two disabilities — ill-health and a lack of knowledge of human nature. I was wrong in both. I was staggered by her speed and industry and the way she could raise money. Her great assets, I should say, are her power, with a single leap of the imagination, to make plans on a national scale; and a supplementary power to see that done down to the last postage stamp. But because she can do all this, people let her do it — often she has to carry her own plans out down to the very last postage stamp. She used all kinds of people; she tested them through results. She is exceedingly charitable in her judgements of people and patient. She assigned one inept person to five different kinds of work before she gave her up. Her abruptness lost some workers, but not the finer spirits. The very absence of anything like personal appeal seemed to help her.”

Haynes describes Alice Paul as having ‘devoted herself to athletics,’ having played varsity basketball, in a class hockey team, and placed third in the women’s tennis tournament. Haynes describes her as a ‘rosy, rounded and vigourous girl then,’ as opposed to when she returned from England after hunger-striking, and was ‘thin to the point of emaciation.’ In her 1974 interview, Paul talked about how much she enjoyed cycling, and had taken a bicycle tour throughout Normandy and Northern France in the summer of 1908.

More than a summation of her curriculum vitae, her letters give us some insights into Alice as a person — her habits, her reasoning, her intellectual influences. We know what books she read and what courses she followed, who her friends and cohorts were, and who and what influenced her.

From her letters at this time, there are many examples that this is a responsible, resourceful, studious, yet socially confident young woman. She interacts with all class levels in society yet her habits remain simple, in keeping with a Quaker background. She uses the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to address her mother, a characteristic of the ‘plain speaking’ of the Quakers. In Germany she does not eat breakfast, she drinks milk rather than the German kaffee, and applies herself seriously to reading books in German.

One of Paul’s lifelong personal habits was “reading everything she could get her hands on.” (1974 Fry interview) In her letter, we see more of her academic influences at the time when Paul requests books to be sent to her, mostly for her classes at the University of Birmingham, what Haynes calles ‘a Catholic choice of courses”: Robert Burns, Carlyle, Ruskin, Locke, Milton, Wordsworth, Dunbar, Baily, Dante, the Iliad, and the Odyssey (12 Dec 1907). She was reading everything from classical literature (she had taken years of Latin at Swarthmore), to poetry, and natural and political philosophy. She takes a lot of Economics and Sociology, but her academic interests are also philosophical in nature:

I am writing this letter in between two classes. I am going to take 2 courses in German, one in psychology, six in Economics & Sociology, one in Philosophy; one on Mohammedon religion & one called the “Spiritual Life” by Dr. Harris. Everyone goes to this. Also am going to take a course in Economics in at Univ. of Birmingham. (7 October 1907)

Paul is resourceful; she keeps scrupulous track of her spending and economizes where possible. She calculates the cost of travel from Philadelphia to Antwerp, and from Antwerp to Berlin. “This makes $94.93 that I spent during the month.” (#6; July 2? 1907)
She takes an active interest in her family’s affairs at home in the United States. She helps determine the choice of Latin in her younger brother Parry’s education. She criticizes the writing style of her younger sister Helen for her use of superlatives. She is concerned with the family’s financial affairs regarding renting out family property: “Did thee rent the little House next to the Home?” (26 Aug 1907; #9)

Overall, the reader is struck by the interlocking network, a ’social quiltwork’ of social and political relationships that Alice Paul knitted, and so confidently. Her journey is filled with seemingly serendipitous events and chance meetings; yet she certainly used any connexion she has to advantage. They show how she navigated through an impressive number of ties to the Quaker community, the upper class, academia and through her work with the poor. In Europe, she extended her already extensive associations into a powerful British political and social reform movement.

The Summer Lane Settlement in Birmingham at the turn of the nineteenth century; Children’s project at the Settlement.

Tags: Alice Paul and the British suffragettes, ERA, NWP, right to vote, women leaders, women's suffrage