Alice Paul
The new radical movement in the US was headed by Alice Paul. Paul was a Quaker and extremely educated for a woman of the time, she held a bachelor's degree as well as a master's degree and Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also held a degree in Philanthropy and had studied social work in England as a graduate student since 1907. While in England she met, and became a disciple of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst. Mrs. Pankhurst, along with her two daughters, was at the head of the militant suffrage movement in Britain. The Pankhursts did everything they could to gain recognition for their fight, along with their followers they crashed government meetings, harassed public officials, were arrested multiple times, and participated in hunger strikes while in jail. Alice Paul was immediately enraptured by their militant style and was soon arrested along with them. While in jail she met Lucy Burns, another American, and the two quickly bonded. They were arrested twice together and were eventually force-fed when they refused to eat out of protest (Clift, 2003).
The Suffrage Parade: The New Radicals Make Their Mark
When Paul returned to America and attended her first NAWSA meeting, she was disappointed with the tedious and polite debates that were held among delegates. The slow-paced, legal battle toward enfranchisement stood in contrast to her experiences in England (Clift, 2003). Even so, Paul and Lucy Burns joined NAWSA's Congressional Committee and helped to organize a massive women's rights march to coincide with Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. On March 3, 1913 over eight thousand women marched from the Capitol to the Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington D.C. It created such a spectacle that when Wilson arrived for his inauguration he found the streets empty, everyone in town had gone to watch the suffrage parade. The parade featured women from countries where suffrage had already been granted, sections honoring the work of women in society, twenty floats, nine bands, and at the head of the procession Inez Milholland Boissevain, an exceptionally beautiful woman, rode a white horse and carried a banner of purple, white, and gold. Purple to signify the royal glory of women, white for purity in the home, and gold for the crown of the victor (Clift, 2003). While the parade was said to have been outstandingly beautiful event, the crowd of male onlookers did not appreciate the connotations. The women were physically and verbally abused without protection from the on looking police. The violence became so bad that troops had to be called in from Fort Meyer to restrain the crowd and over a hundred marchers were taken to the emergency room (Clift, 2003).
*photo source: (Bain News Service, 1915)
The Second Split
The suffrage parade was exactly the type of attention grabbing events that Paul and Burns wanted to create. The leaders at NAWSA, however, worried that the image portrayed by these radical young women would hurt the progress they had made. Paul and Burns continued to work under NAWSA for a short time while organizing visits to the White House to pressure President Wilson into accepting women's suffrage. When they received no support from Wilson, Paul organized a march on the White House and received a promise from Wilson that he would support the creation of a Committee on Suffrage in the House of Representatives. However, when the time came for him to address Congress he made no mention of a committee. Paul began plans for retaliation but was rebuked by Catt and others at NAWSA who feared offending lawmakers and diminishing their chances at passing a bill. This tension eventually led to Paul breaking away from NAWSA. Together with Burns and other radicals, she formed the Congressional Union (CU) (Clift, 2003).
As the 1915 elections loomed, Paul, along with the newly founded CU traveled to the nine states that had legalized suffrage for women and fought a campaign against the Democrats of those states for not passing the suffrage amendment. Leaders of NAWSA were horrified at this because it meant fighting against suffragists, however, the CU managed to defeat 20 suffrage supporting Democrats. This furthered the divide between NAWSA and the CU, Anna Shaw, a NAWSA leader, remarked, "they have lost our amendment for us; I shall never forgive them" (Clift, 2003, p. 102). As the rift between the two factions grew, Paul began plans for a new era of the suffrage movement. She had grown tired of the existing suffrage organizations and their routine pleas for justice, she believed that lawmakers had grown impervious to these methods as well and decided that the country needed a new political party, "she wanted to 'terrify' the men in Congress with a new party that could rival the clout of Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose or Progressive party" (Clift, 2003, p. 107). With this in mind, the CU organized a meeting in Washington where they formally announced the new National Woman's Party (NWP) and scheduled a convention in Chicago, where Paul knew there would be plenty of publicity. Almost immediately, state groups for the new Woman's Party were formed and envoys were dispatched to the West to unite the women who had the vote behind the NWP. Paul's principle behind the NWP was to "hold the party in power responsible," by denying support to the existing parties until women had gained suffrage (Harrington). The "party in power," in this case meant President Wilson's Democratic Party. The Chicago convention attracted over fifteen hundred delegates from around the country. The NWP scheduled it to correspond with the Republican and Progressive conventions which meant plenty of publicity for the suffragists (Clift, 2003).
*photo source: (Harris & Ewing, 1920)