In 1910 Alice Paul became involved in the women’s suffrage movement, Paul was a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and served as the chair of its congressional committee. After women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920, Paul devoted herself to working on additional empowerment measures for women. In 1923, she introduced the first Equal Rights Amendment in Congress and in later decades worked on the civil rights bill and fair employment practices.
(The video Below Represents Alice Paul and her Women's Rights activist leadership throughout her years.)
She Took Action: On October 20 Paul was arrested and sentenced to seven months in prison. She, like many of the other women, was sent to the Occoquan Workhouse, where she was placed in solitary confinement with nothing to eat but bread and water. When she grew weak she was dispatched to the prison hospital, where she began a hunger strike that other women joined. She was remanded to a psychiatric ward and threatened with being sent to an insane asylum. She was force-fed and subjected to systematic sleep deprivation.
"Food simply isn't important to me." - Alice Paul
Until she died by a stroke in 1974, Alice Paul continued her fight for women’s rights. She died on July 9, 1977, in the town of her birth.
Analysis: Alice Paul was a strong, independent, and brilliant women. She stood up for what she believed in and I admire her for that. She almost gave up her life so that the women after her could be treated fairly. Alice Paul, and others like her, changed how American Women were treated.
"I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality." -Alice Paul