Alice Paul Biography

Alice Paul

Raised a Quaker, Paul graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905 and studied at the New York School of Social Work. From 1906 to 1909, Paul was a social worker in England. She was also jailed three times for her suffragist efforts. Paul received an MA in 1907, and a Ph.D., in absentia, from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1912 she became head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's congressional committee. But she left the group a year later to help form the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. In 1917 the organization joined the Woman's Party to create the National Woman's Party. Paul was jailed three more times for her militancy. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, she earned a law degree from Washington College of Law, and MA and Ph.D. degrees from American University. In 1923, Paul wrote an equal rights amendment to the Constitution and introduced it in Congress. The measure failed and Paul began supporting the League of Nations. In 1938 she founded the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, known as the World Women's Party. She represented the party at the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva. She was elected to chair the National Woman's Party in 1942, and continued to lobby for an equal rights amendment. Paul successfully lobbied for wording on gender equality to be included in the preamble to the United Nations Charter and in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.