30 Day Awesome Women Meme, Day 3

[featherxquill]

1. Someone you've loved since you were little
2. Someone you discovered recently

3. A leader



~ Alice Paul ~

This might be a name and a story that all the American members of my flist know from school, but this is a woman I only learned about when I watched the film linked at the end of this post. There are plenty of women in all countries who fought for the right to vote, but I find this story particularly affecting.

From Wikipedia:

Alice Paul received her undergraduate education from Swarthmore College, and then earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly after her graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Paul joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and was appointed Chairwoman of their Congressional Committee in Washington, DC. After months of fundraising and raising awareness for the cause, membership numbers went up in 1913. Their focus was lobbying for a constitutional amendment to secure the right to vote for women. Such an amendment had originally been sought by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who tried securing the vote on a state-by-state basis.

When their lobbying efforts proved fruitless, Paul and her colleagues formed the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and began introducing some of the methods used by the suffrage movement in Britain. Tactics included demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch fires, and hunger strikes. These actions were accompanied by press coverage and the publication of the weekly Suffragist.

In the US presidential election of 1916, Paul and the NWP campaigned against the continuing refusal of President Woodrow Wilson and other incumbent Democrats to support the Suffrage Amendment actively. In January 1917, the NWP staged the first political protest to picket the White House. The picketers, known as "Silent Sentinels," held banners demanding the right to vote. This was an example of a non-violent civil disobedience campaign. In July 1917, picketers were arrested on charges of "obstructing traffic." Many, including Paul, were convicted and incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia (later the Lorton Correctional Complex) and the District of Columbia Jail. In a protest of the conditions in Occoquan, Paul commenced a hunger strike, which led to her being moved to the prison’s psychiatric ward and force-fed raw eggs through a plastic tube. This, combined with the continuing demonstrations and attendant press coverage, kept pressure on the Wilson administration. In January, 1918, Wilson announced that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure", and strongly urged Congress to pass the legislation. In 1920, after coming down to one vote in the state of Tennessee, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution secured the vote for women.

See also: Iron Jawed Angels

If you enjoy the trailer, click through to Youtube and the 'related videos' should link you to the full film uploaded there.


4. A mother
5. A fighter
6. A goddess
7. Someone funny
8. Someone bitchy
9. Someone sexy
10. A writer
11. A singer
12. An artist
13. An actress
14. An athlete
15. Anyone you like
16. A woman of colour
17. A woman with a disability
18. A lesbian, bisexual, transgenderd or genderqueer woman/individual
19. Someone you'd love to have teach you
20. Someone you'd love to get drunk with
21. Someone you wouldn't want to cross
22. Someone you'd love to be for a day
23. A woman from traditionally male arena (politics, science, medicine, military, etc)
24. A woman over 50
25. An activist
26. A woman from the past
27. A woman of the future
28. Someone you once disliked but now admire
29. Someone from your own life
30. Anyone you like

Comments

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

You'd be amazed how little Americans learn about women's history in the usual public school. Or about history in general, really -- Our public education just gets worse and worse. I think the only Americans likely to have heard of of fascinating women like Alice Paul are history buffs who read things on their own (like me.)

So it's great to see her memorialized here (and I enjoyed that movie).

[cranky--crocus.livejournal.com]

I loved that film. I didn't really learn much in history back in gradeschool/high school, but I did research her a touch after watching this film as well. I think I'll do more of it and try to have a Sister Suffragette day at my uni or something, as part of the Women's Campaign, reminding the women what the women before us went through to get us the vote.

[zwoelfchen.livejournal.com]

Wonderful and moving film. I keep recommending it to people, too.