Alice Paul: Champion of Women's Suffrage

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Alice Paul was a great American suffragist, feminist, and women’s rights activist. She was the main leader and strategist behind the 1910s campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited sex discrimination when voting and guaranteed women the right to vote in all elections at the local, state, and national levels. She was the diligent leader of a popular political party, the National Women’s Party, which was a group of militant suffragists who took to the streets with mass pickets, parades and hunger strikes to persuade the government to give them the right vote (Hutchinson Encyclopedia). Alice Paul attended numerous prestigious colleges including Swarthmore College, American University, University of Pennsylvania, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Alice Paul chose this day and location specifically to pressure Woodrow Wilson to support women’s rights. Woodrow Wilson had immense leverage over Congress, making his support critical for the women’s rights cause. Alice Paul assembled eight-thousand volunteer marchers to represent the women’s rights movement. The march quickly turned violent when the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania national guards created a barrier. The incident did, however, bring the women’s rights movement more awareness and The pickets used nonviolent civil disobedience and referred to themselves as the Silent Sentinels. This picketing continued from January to April, but at the start of World War I support decreased as the picketers were seen as disloyal. Many of the picketers were arrested for traffic obstruction. Alice Paul was convicted and sent to the District of Columbia Jail. The public strongly criticized President Woodrow Wilson for arresting peaceful protesters, so out of public shame, he pardoned the women from their convictions after two days (Alice

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