The Suffragists Oral History Project was designed to tape record interviews with the leaders of the woman's suffrage movement in order to document their activities in behalf of passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and their continuing careers as leaders of movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Because the existing documentation of the suffrage struggle indicates a need for additional material on the campaign of the National Woman's Party, the contribution of this small but highly active group has been the major focus of the series.

The project, underwritten by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, enabled the Regional Oral History Office to record first-hand accounts of this early period in the development of women's rights with twelve women representing both the leadership and the rank and file of the movement. Five held important positions in the National Woman's Party. They are Sara Bard Field, Burnita Shelton Matthews, Alice Paul, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, and Mabel Vernon. Seven interviews are with women who campaigned for suffrage at state and local levels, working with other suffrage organizations. Among this group is Jeannette Rankin, who capped a successful campaign for suffrage in Montana with election to the House of Representatives, the first woman to achieve this distinction. Others are Valeska Bary, Jessie Haver Butler, Miriam Allen de Ford, Ernestine Kettler, Laura Ellsworth Seiler, and Sylvie Thygeson.

Planning for the Suffragists Project and some preliminary interviews had been undertaken prior to receipt of the grant. The age of the women—74 to 104—was a compelling motivation. A number of these interviews were conducted by Sherna Gluck, Director of the Feminist History Research Project in Los Angeles, who has been recording interviews with women active in the suffrage campaigns and the early labor movement. Jacqueline Parker, who was doing post-doctoral research on the history of the social welfare movement, taped interviews with Valeska Bary. A small grant from a local donor permitted Malca Chall to record four sessions with Jeannette Rankin. Both Valeska Bary and Jeannette Rankin died within a few months of their last interviewing session.

The grant request submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation covered funding both to complete these already-recorded interviews and to broaden the scope and enrich the value of the project by the inclusion of several women not part of the leadership. The grant, made in April, 1973, also provided for the deposit of all the completed interviews in five major manuscript repositories which collect women's history materials.

In the process of research, a conference with Anita Politzer (who served more than three decades in the highest offices of the National Woman's Party, but was not well enough to tape record that story) produced the entire series of and those volumes of the missing from Alice Paul's collection; negotiations are currently underway so that these in-party organs can be available to scholars everywhere.

The Suffragists Project as conceived by the Regional Oral History Office is to be the first unit in a series on women in politics. Unit two will focus on interviews with politically active and successful women who are incumbents in elective office today.

The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons prominent in the history of the West and the nation. The Office is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, Director of The Bancroft Library.

Alice Paul was the leader of the more militant suffrage and equal rights organization called the National Woman's Party. After campaigning in England with Mrs. Pankhurst, the young Quaker returned to this country, finished a Ph.D., and in 1912 became the head of the congressional committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her group soon spun off from the mother organization, rejecting the state-by-state referenda as a method of achieving equal suffrage and evolving into the National Woman's Party, which worked for suffrage by constitutional amendment. The energetic militants soon became known for their central political strategies: make suffrage a mainstream issue through public demonstrations and protests, and increase political clout by holding the party in power responsible in elections in western states where women already had the vote.

The actual tape recording of Alice Paul's memoir was preceded by a half dozen years of intermittent and fruitless negotiations between this indomitable leader and myself. I first met her when I came to research the archives of the National Woman's Party headquarters at the Alva-Belmont House in Washington and to read the party's papers in the Library of Congress.

Each trip east thereafter I stayed at the Alva-Belmont House, where Alice lived and where women writers, doctors, lawyers, and long-time Woman's Party members frequently sojourned. There Alice and I had long conversations at night about the past. While these increased our friendship, they did little to got Alice's own story preserved for posterity: she objected to tape or notebook, and explained more than once that it was unthinkable to embark on a taping project when the ERA still needed everyone's assistance in Congress. It was not long before I was sporadically lobbying House Judiciary Subcommittee members for passage of the ERA whenever I was in Washington, or when Alice called me and I could arrange my work to go.

I had jokingly struck a bargain with Alice: I would lobby if she would agree to tape record after ERA passed Congress. While my lobbying held undetermined value for the ERA, it was an indispensable apprenticeship for historical inquiry into political processes. I am indebted to Alice and to the National Woman's Party for making this experience possible.

It was Alice's departure from Washington after the passage of the ERA in Congress in 1972 that set the stage for our interviews. Although she continued to nurse ratification through state after state from her telephone in her lakeside cottage in Ridgefield, Connecticut, she has never returned to headquarters. The abrupt change in leadership in the National Woman's Party which occurred at that time is a fertile subject for theses of the future.

Regardless of her continuing work on ratification, Alice recognized that she could make time to tape her memoirs, and she invited me to come to Ridgefield.

Our first interview sessions were held November 24 to 26, 1972, with neither of us knowing whether there would ever be adequate funding for transcribing, correcting, and retyping. The following spring Rockefeller Foundation made possible the processing of that session's tapes and a much-needed second session, which we held May 10 to 12, 1973. Both were three-day marathons. See the more detailed account, "Interviewer's impressions," dictated December 30, 1972, which follows.The second session circles back to expand on some of the material we had covered during the first because the arrival of the grant made possible additional research in other collections and, therefore, different questions.

Among sources which proved most helpful were the National Woman's Party's the , a weekly publication which became in 1923, Inez Haynes Irwin's (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1921), and Doris Stevens, (New York, 1920). Many papers relating to the Woman's Party and Alice Paul were found in several cross-referenced collections in Radcliffe College's Schlesinger Library and in the Anne Martin-Mable Vernon papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Because at the time of the interview the National Woman's Party was denying most people, including myself, access to Paul's papers and other materials in the headquarter's library, the ample footnotes in the thesis of Loretta Ellen Zimmerman, who earlier had had access to the Paul correspondence, were of unique value. (See Ph.D. diss., Tulane University 1964.)

Among difficult-to-locate books that Alice made available at her cottage was one whose careful documentation made it especially helpful: Carolyn Katzenstein's written from her notes at the time of the campaigns; although it is from the vantage point of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Woman's Party it sheds a great deal of light on the national scene. The classic six-volume history of suffrage from the view of the National American Woman Suffrage Association is probably familiar to anyone who reads Alice Paul's transcript; volumes V and VI, edited by Ida Husted Harper and published in New York in 1922, provided the first steps in my preparation. So also did the ground-breaking history,, written by Eleanor Flexner in 1959 for Harvard University Press; chapters XX to XXIV of my paperback copy (Atheneum Press) were well-thumbed by the time Alice agreed to tape record. Other more recent books on suffrage and on the broader struggle for women's rights (like William L. O'Neill's, Quadrangle, Chicago, 1969) were used and are referred to in the interview text.

Alice was still working on ratification of the ERA in Connecticut and other states when I sent her the rough-edited version of the first two chapters of our transcript. As could be predicted, they lay on her desk while she organized supporters via her telephone, and while her next door neighbor and close friend, "Scotty" Reynolds, and I carried on a lively correspondence about how to get Alice to check through it. Among other obstacles, Alice was plagued by poor vision and would not take the time to get new glasses.

Then, one day in March, 1974, Alice fell. Ultimately she was taken to a New York hospital, then transferred shortly to a nursing home in Ridgefield. Diagnoses had progressed from "just bruises" to a concussion to a mild stroke. Her period of residence at the nursing home drew more protracted, and in November I was granted the rare privilege of visiting her. She was eager to know how the ERA campaign was progressing and anxious to get to Washington so she could properly organize her papers for deposit in an archive. Although our discussion was as lucid as old times, an anxiety to return to her cottage underlay her customary serenity, probably because she still was denied newspapers, TV news, letters, phone calls and visitors. We agreed that her transcript should be issued as soon as possible, that this office would finish it in its verbatim form and edit any ambiguities in the text with notations in footnotes and brackets.

Her nephew, Donald Paul, proofread the manuscript and added notations about the family, which are in brackets and footnotes and attributed to him.

At this writing, the current legal efforts on Alice's behalf have removed some of the restrictions on her, two years after she was placed in the convalescent home. Hopes are high that she may indeed move back into her cottage. It should be noted that her indomitable spirit and powerful mind may well lend her determination enough to live to see the ERA through to ratification and to establish her long-cherished plan for a world-wide equal rights organization. The wise research historian using this manuscript would be well-advised to check for a post-memoir career for Alice Paul.

Dictated on December 30, 1972 after the interview sessions of November 24-26, 1972; edited, December 23, 1975.

Alice Paul and I met about six years before the interview, when I had gone to Washington searching for material about Sara Bard Field's 1915 automobile campaign for suffrage. National Woman's Party headquarters, in the elegant and ancient Alva-Belmont mansion, housed a veritable goldmine of suffrage material in its library. When I met Alice Paul to get her permission to use it, she wondered aloud how anyone in good conscience could spend research time on the long-gone suffrage campaign when so much effort was currently needed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. I pondered silently how anyone could continue to make history and remain insensitive to the historical imperative.

After that first stalemate, I usually took one of the rooms at the elegant Alva-Belmont House whenever I was in Washington. There, after dinner in the garden in the warmer months, or with trays in the living room if it was winter, Alice would tell me some of the history of the Equal Rights Amendment. When our talks stretched into the evening hours, she would even go into her recollections of the suffrage struggle, and often our sessions would not break up until the early hours of morning. But she would never let me turn on a tape recorder, and if I pulled out a pencil to take notes she would say, "Oh, don't take notes on this. This isn't really worthwhile," or "Everything we have is either in the Library of Congress or right here."

In 1972 the Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress. It was yet to be ratified, but she had moved to Connecticut because there were some drastic changes taking place at the Alva-Belmont House. At the same time an article had appeared on her in a popular history magazine which she felt was unsatisfactory. These two factors created hope that she might finally respond to the constant overtures to tape record her life history. Perhaps Alice realized that because she had never produced a memoir she was going to have more inaccurate articles appearing about her, but that if she could record a fairly complete oral history, writers would have access to her account of her life which they could use without bothering her.

It was November and I was in Washington when I called Alice in Connecticut to make arrangements to begin an interview. We decided that she would see me the Monday before Thanksgiving. However, there were difficulties in my getting access to the library in the Alva-Belmont House, so that pre-interview research was slowed as I searched out substitute sources in Washington and New York. We postponed our date to Thanksgiving Day itself.

I was to meet her in her cottage in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She was fretting and apologetic over the fact that she could not provide her usual level of hospitality because she had just moved in. One hostessing problem was that she had not found anyone to cook for us. I remembered that at Belmont House, she always had a cook come in to prepare breakfast and dinner. I assured her that I was happy and able to do the cooking or anything else domestic; but she wouldn't hear of that. Further evidence of her hospitality was her insistence on having me met at the train some fifteen miles away at the Stamford station. Lacking a driver and a car, she arranged for a taxi driver to watch for me at the train and take me to Ridgefield.

Inadvertently, I was delivered to Alice's little white frame cottage about thirty minutes earlier than expected. I knocked. A dismayed Alice Paul opened the door; she had not yet dressed for the day, and her handyman's wife was still running the vacuum cleaner. (She introduced her not as her handyman's wife but as "a friend and neighbor.") For Alice's peace of mind, I wanted to back out the door and re-enter in twenty minutes. But she soon reappeared in a dress of brilliant turquoise sparkling with bead trim. A long string of pearls was further accented with a star- shaped pin of gold netting with a pearl at its center, which I suddenly realized had almost become a symbol of Alice Paul to me. She had worn it frequently in Washington, and, regrettably, I never asked her where it came from.

The little white cottage had been owned jointly by her and her late brother since the middle thirties, and although she had lived here in the forties while she worked with the United Nations at Lake Success, she was now converting it for permanent living. It was rustic, built by some early day Thoreau and his daughter on the edge of a small, wooded lake which Alice Paul also owned. The house itself still had the wide, wide planks that the early builders had hewn by hand. Ax marks still lined the rough logs that formed the ceiling beams. A great fireplace dominated the main room, which was a rather modest-sized living room with a windowed bay which, lined with blooming plants, served as a dining area. The other rooms had been added long before. There are now two bedrooms, a bath, and a study off the living room. In the study was a beautifully preserved rosewood desk that had belonged to Susan B. Anthony. Beyond is another addition, an airy sunroom windowed on three sides over the lake. There is a small kitchen, and adjacent to it a built-on informal breakfast room of brick and wood and tile; behind that was what Alice called the "back kitchen," which holds pantries, a small coal bin, and a place where the handyman stored the logs that he cut for the fireplace. The basement apartment below was being made into a year-round flat, and a young woman had rented it, a potter.

The period furniture was comfortable overstuffed, carved, and dark-stained. There were no graphics, paintings (except family portraits ), objets d'art, or sound systems for music, unless one counts the small radio on the kitchen table—used mainly for news while I was there.

Throughout the house, particularly in the bedroom I was assigned, were portraits of members of her family, all of whom were Quakers, going back to the time the first Quakers arrived on the American continent. Alice carefully identified each one as she showed me around. Over the fireplace was a beautiful portrait in oil of a woman whom I think she said was two generations ahead of her, a close relative of William Penn. (I think she had Penn in her name.) Alice's family had been in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for many, many generations and had been Quaker even before the first one came to America. Her grandfather had helped establish Swarthmore College, where her mother attended. This strong Quaker tradition comes out in the interview.

Alice's relatively simple housekeeping needs were met by neighbors who were also close friends. "Scotty"(A.S.) Reynolds, who lived next door in a house also owned by Alice, was a competent, witty woman retired from magazine (she had been a photography editor) and a dear friend of Alice's. It was she who cooked and brought over Thanksgiving dinner for us.

The day I arrived was crisp and cold. Ice edged the lake, and Alice had given a local carpenter the task of fitting storm windows. After her handyman laid a fire in the fireplace, Alice said to me, "Now I will make you Captain of the Fireplace." The title was never fully earned, but I shoveled and poked assiduously, and Alice assured me that I was a marvelous firebuilder.

She's very good at thanking people—a trait I noticed with some surprise when lobbying for her. Inez Haynes Irwin had written in 1921, "...it never occurred to [Alice Paul] to thank anybody... " Irwin, Inez Haynes, reprinted 1964, Traversity Press, Penobscot, Maine, p. 25. Formerly, Harcourt, Brace & World,New York, 1921. Yet often, in response to a task performed by the handyman, or Scotty, or the carpenter, she would say, "Oh, that's so wonderful you were able to do that, and do such a good job, and do it with such dispatch. I don't know what I would do without you."

The same concern for people close to her showed in her attitude toward the young woman who had taken the apartment downstairs. The tenant frequently complained that she was cold, and she probably was. Alice would then request that I turn up the thermostat, thus making it too hot upstairs so that the basement would be habitable. To put an end to this untenable situation Alice had ordered a new furnace installed in the small apartment. In the meantime she frequently asked the handyman or the carpenter (they were always coming in and out) to check to see if the tenant was comfortable. When she invariably said that she was still cold, Alice, very concerned, would say, "She always says it's cold." Although a little annoyed, she was going to great expense to make the apartment comfortable.

To prepare for our interview sessions, Alice had assembled in the study her complete set of the (the weekly National Woman's Party magazine for the suffrage movement) and other papers. By this time, I had drafted three different interview outlines—one in Berkeley, one in Washington, and now a third was developing from the additional records; I was frantically trying to get these combined before she was ready to record. After our Thanksgiving dinner we talked at length about the scope of the history and what it should include. As we talked, her sense of scholarship expanded her role from respondant to co-worker.

A few days before, contrary to her life-long policy, she had agreed to a long journalism interview. The lucky writer was Robert S. Gallagher from magazine. Gallagher, Robert S., an interview,, February, 1974, pp. 17-24, 92-94. While she felt that this young man was perfectly able and most charming, she was having grave second thoughts because of qualms that she had limited unduly her answers to his questions and omitted some vital material.

At that point, we agreed that in our interview I would ask questions, that we would cover the subject year by year chronologically, and that she would tell everything of relevance that she could think of, whether I asked her or not; whenever I felt she was leaving out something, I would ask. This is pretty much the way the interview developed, although we had to review this procedure two or three times before we really got a firm agreement that was clear to both of us.

Alice was eighty-seven at this time and she was in fragile physical condition. Trying to keep a balance between her strong mental and intellectual health and her precarious physical health presented a challenge for which, as an interviewer, I was scarcely prepared. About six months before, in May, one of Alice's friends in Washington sensing some deterioration in her general health had whisked her to a New York hospital. Although they both told me what happened, it still is not clear to me. It seems that after the amendment passed Congress, Alice had what she called a "tired heart." In the hospital her pulse rate was very low, she was given digitalis, and after a few days she returned to Connecticut.

She discussed this in quite cavalier fashion, partly because she has only airy disdain for any physical discomfort and thus refuses to dignify ill health by catering to it, or even admitting it exists. Alice told me of the Christian Science influence on her by her brother, who after his marriage had become a Christian Scientist, and of his widow who was still living in Connecticut.

During the intervening six months since her hospitalization, Alice saw no doctor, but a local "visiting nurse" regularly came to see her. That was her only contact with the medical world. Since her own doctor in New York was too far away to be of assistance even should Alice have needed her, it was necessary to maintain a careful and continual check on Alice's health, in order to be aware of significant changes that might require immediate attention. Scotty, having had some first aid training, came over daily, and listened to Alice's heartbeats with a stethoscope, kept a daily log of her heart rate, and checked to see whether her ankles were swollen. That was the extent of Alice's medical care.

Planning to start the interview the following day, we stayed up rather late that first night. I worked even later in my own room in order to complete my research. Alice awoke very early the next morning and, noticing that the furnace was off, hauled the logs from the back kitchen into the living room and built a fire. By the time I finally got up, probably two hours later, the house was still very, very cold.

As I began to make breakfast for us, I noticed that Alice looked rather gray; she obviously was not well. My first impulse was to dash to the phone and call Scotty, but I didn't know either her phone number or her whole name. I wrestled with the stethoscope but couldn't distinguish Alice's heartbeat. Finally, I counted her wrist pulse—47 and very irregular. Even with no medical background, I knew that she was a sick woman. She accepted the idea that she had better lie down —a big concession. She was very chilled.

Scotty was due to come by some time that morning. In the meantime the handyman came and, as the only person who knew the cottage's electrical system, was able to hook up the heating pad. We piled blankets and hot water bottles on her. I was feeling somewhat panicked. Here was Alice needing medical attention and there was none at close hand. Because it was the Thanksgiving weekend, I knew that even a call to a New York hospital would not produce a doctor. Although we were close to the biggest concentration of medical facilities in the world, we might as well have been in the Australian' bush. The irony could be tragic.

Scotty appeared in a few minutes. We had a hurried conference. Alice protested. She would not hear of our even calling the visiting nurse. She said she would be quite fine, we were not to worry, nor, clearly, were we to worry her. She got so anxious about our calling in some medical help on a Thanksgiving weekend that we felt we were making matters worse by discussing it. She asked to be left alone.

I took some of the suffrage literature from her library and sat by her bedroom doorway where I could ostensibly study, but where I really could watch her closely by looking in at her sideways. I knew she would object if she caught me watching. Scotty gave me her phone number so I could call if Alice's condition seriously changed.

So the day passed with me sitting at her doorway, doing whatever research I could, and surreptitiously watching her. The carpenter was in and out building stormwindows, and Alice actually roused enough to give him directions, then went back to sleep.

Alice got up about seven or eight o'clock that evening, astonished at the incredible fact that she had slept all day. I tried to take her pulse; I tried to hear her heart. Again I could not find her heart with the stethoscope, and our efforts dissolved into giggles that mercifully released the tension of the day. When I counted three widely varying rates for her pulse, we concluded that all we had to go on was the way she felt. Her color was much better, she was warm, and much of her energy had returned, but the prognosis was still quite obscure.

Then she called her Christian Scientist sister-in-law. I remember Alice saying, "No, I don't really need you to come over; I just wanted you to know that—that I feel this way, that this is going on—because I thought that would help." She said this very matter of factly, and, after a little conversation, she hung up. She retired for the night confident that she was going to be all right, and the next morning she was.

I was careful to leave my door open in order to get up when she did, and thereby prevent her from hauling wood, or in any other way exerting herself, although the problems of the day before had been resolved at least temporarily. The oil company, which had inadvertently let Alice run out of oil, finally filled the tank and the furnace was started again. Coal and a large bag of wood had been hauled in by the fireplace. Scotty came over, took her pulse, and found it had much improved. After breakfast we began the taping, but we agreed that, having lost a day, we would only have time to talk about Alice's life up through the suffrage period.

The world outside now was a deep freeze with the lake a solid crystal plain. During a break, Alice stood at the window and showed me where she and her brother had sold a number of lots around the shore. Some beautiful homes are tucked back in the woods. A large piece of land was saved around her cottage. She told me that the lake had become quite a worry to her because one million dollars a year in insurance was required to cover liability for almost anything that could happen on the lakeshore. She was beginning to think of selling the lake to the city of Ridgefield, which wanted to buy it.

While I prepared a lunch for us that day, Alice was looking pink and bright-eyed. I mentioned this to her, and she said, "I thought I would, after I called my sister-in-law." (In fact, she looked stronger than I felt after the perils of the day before.)

Her diet was meatless. "Alice, when did you become vegetarian?", I asked. I think she said it was just after the suffrage campaign. She laughed and said, "I didn't have much time to think about such things until then. It occurred to me that I just didn't see how I could go ahead and continue to eat meat. It just seemed so—cannibalistic to me. And so," she said, "I'm a vegetarian, and I have been ever since." Perhaps Alice's experiences of hunger strikes in the prisons, both in England and in this country, may have had an effect on her attitude about food in general. Two or three times she has said to me, "Food simply isn't important to me; they're always bringing in these things," referring to her refrigerator which was stacked wall-to-wall and shelf-to-shelf with all kinds of health food. It was another proof that "taking care" of Alice requires some very adroit chicanery.

A corollary to this was Alice's sincere inability to recall past physical discomfort. Our interview starts out with a discussion of whether she really did spend some time in a rain storm on the roof of a building in England during a suffrage protest. To the writer, she had denied this had ever hapened. I was puzzled by her denial, and the interview opens by my showing her both the Pankhurst and the Inez Haynes Irwin accounts of this. Pankhurst, Estelle Sylvia,. New York, Sturgis & Walton Company, 1911. One says she spent the whole night on the roof in the rain; the other only that she was up there for quite a time. Alice was perplexed and amazed that this actually had happened. Another instance was a scuffle during the picketing of the White House in which, I believe, a sailor was reported to have knocked Alice down and dragged her across the sidewalk. She said she doesn't ever remember being manhandled.

She also insisted that the account of that first parade of the Woman's Party, in March, 1912, during which the U.S. Cavalry and police were called in, was not a "riot," nor that anyone got roughed up; the reports she claimed have been exaggerated. I'm inclined to accept this because reports of mass actions inevitably tend to become exaggerated.

This lack of concern about her physical condition probably accounts for the fact that she simply cannot recall hunger strikes in prison (or even being hungry). Nor can she remember what must have been extreme physical discomfort, or much of anything concerning her treatment there. Thus the interview is lacking some of the more brutal details about the prison experiences, but, that would hardly be the major value of an interview with Alice Paul.

Her ability to set strategy rapidly and unerringly is one of the most astounding things about her. About two years before the interview Alice had asked me to come to Washington to do a week of lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. I happily agreed. First of all, I believed in the cause. I also wanted to see what it was like to work under Alice Paul.

Alice, then age eighty-five, had a running record in her head of every congressman. She knew almost anything that she needed to know about his past actions on the ERA and his operations with other congressmen. She usually knew the attitudes of wives, secretaries, and administrative assistants. She knew that Mrs. Alan Cranston had her hair coiffed in a particular place where Alice sometimes went. (Belmont House was across the parking lot from the Senate Office Building.) Thus had she become acquainted with Mrs. Cranston, and it was through Mrs. Cranston that she had been working to get Senator Cranston's approval of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Her knowledge of the connections in Washington as well as out in the states was amazing. It was clear that in the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, as it wore on through the decades, she had utilized a small nucleus of women, maybe only one or two women per state, who in turn knew how to contact those persons most influential with the key senators and with certain congressmen. In more recent years she had been concerned with the members of the judiciary committees, since the struggle came to focus there. The result was a very compact campaign. There was only a little of the big, scattergun grass roots approach to create support which in turn would bring pressure on the Congress in general. Before I went back to California, I found myself appointed Northern California chairman for the ERA (much as I was appointed Captain of the Fireplace) and I understood why I had few troops to command.

In lobbying, I learned to apply caution after talking to Alice. When she would tell me what a congressman had once done for the ERA, it could have been several congresses ago. I had to check before I went to talk to him to be certain that the last time he had helped on the Equal Rights Amendment was indeed recent enough to form a basis for current action. This same trait enabled Alice Paul to put two and two together to make a vote. Finding the two and two often required complete recall, and she carried the chess board of maybe thirty Congresses and political manueverings thereof in her head, and from that formulated her own successful strategy.

Alice Paul's executive ability included an uncanny way to utilize whatever manpower was within her range. Irwin has written about this at length, and in the seventies it was still true. I witnessed one coup about 1970 that she brought off when a young woman from Los Angeles came with her sociologist husband to do some research on the woman's movement. They asked to use the library in Belmont House, one of the best women's political history libraries at that time. They needed access to some as- yet-uncatalogued, unorganized papers that were sitting in boxes in the old, old, rambling two-story carriage house, one of two buildings behind Belmont House. (This building has since been torn down for a Senate parking lot.) The sociologist appeared to be apolitical and intent on doing his research while his meager budget for travel expenses lasted; he could stay only a very limited number of days. I met both of them and commiserated over the fact that he would probably never get in to see those papers because of Alice's belief that the ERA work should have top priority with everyone.

Later that day Alice mentioned to me, "You know, Chita, he's from Los Angeles. I wonder if he knows Congressman Danielson? He probably could go speak to him as a constituent." Doubting that the scholar would submit to a lobbying assignment, I murmured that it was unlikely he would be from Danielson's district. Danielson was the lone urban Democrat in the subcommittee who had voted against the ERA, causing a tie vote. Neither Don Edwards, the subcommittee chairman, nor anyone else, could figure out why. I had talked to the solon twice and had received only a "Well, maybe I'll vote to bring it up again," but that had been as far as I could got with him.

Alice found that although the sociologist himself did not come from the congressman's district, he volunteered to Alice that his students had done some research in that district and had found that the young Mexican-Americans were very much for equal rights for women, whereas the older Mexican-American women couldn't have cared less. Alice said matter-of-factly to him, "I want you to go to Congressman Danielson and tell him that his district is changing, and that he'll be put out of office because of these changes of the young Mexican-Americans that are now of voting age in his district." The professor, disgruntled at the prospect of spending his limited research time lobbying, protested that he didn't have the money or the time to go over and try to see Danielson. Sometimes hours, even days were required to get in to talk with a congressman not from one's own district.

Shortly Alice told me that he did talk to Danielson. And Danielson, as a matter of fact, did request that the ERA be voted on again in the subcommittee, at which point it was voted out for a full committee vote.

At the end of my first week's lobbying, my notes of June 29, 1971, read, "...I marvel at her [Alice's] obsession. By the third day, I was delirious to have a break from the continuous pressure of advocacy. It was like living with a single beam of strong light piercing my world constantly. I accepted a lunch appointment with a single-tax expert—mainly to have an hour's reprieve. It was almost a holy moment, like stepping off a race track for a time. And I knew that a mile away was Alice, in the 180th day of the forty-ninth year of telephoning, assigning tasks, getting advocate statements written, and running her small army. At times I doubt that. she ever notices the news about Viet Nam or the ghetto riots..."

Alice's campaign, in fact her whole life, was a one-issue affair: women's rights. Moving to the drum beat of her commitment, she is a person whose tremendous intellectual energy is put behind that commitment, with no tangents allowed.

But there were times when other issues almost intervened. It required fortitude, but Alice would not let the Viet Nam war issue in the late sixties interfere with or become related to the Equal Rights Amendment issue, just as she had refused to allow World War I to slow the suffrage campaign. One weekend when I was in Washington, women were gathering for a women's peace march on Washington that was led by Alice's old friend, Jeannette Rankin. Jeannette Rankin was staying at the Alva-Belmont House, as were some of the other so-called "Rankin File" marchers. Alice was anxious that their presence at the National Woman's Party headquarters have no relationship to the events of that weekend. She mentioned to me that evening how NBC and CBS network men and reporters from and had been trying to get interviews with the leaders of the march there at the house, but how she feared a background of the National Woman's Party headquarters would connect the ERA with the anti-Viet Nam marchers. She singlehandedly held off what sounded like the entire national news media—and quite successfully too.

There is another aspect to Alice's personality that one has to keep in mind: her background of aristocracy. Her family was cultured and well-to-do. They were also highly respected leaders in the Quaker community. These two worlds—her family and the Society of Friends—were the only worlds she knew until after she was graduated from Swarthmore. Her contact with other socio- economic classes was limited to the maids who worked for them, and the fact that the maids went dancing and behaved differently was excused because they were "that class" of people. Her class consciousness is still something that one from a different generation senses now and then. While she always denied that the women's movement she has led has been made up primarily of the higher socio-economic classes, the actual proportion of upper middle class educated women who participated in successive phases of the campaign might be the subject of further research.

The attention to class carries over into her campaign. For instance, when I was working for her in the ERA campaign, I would come in to report after lobbying on the Hill. Regarding a certain congressman, "What is he?" she would ask. Her question always baffled me. She meant, was his name Irish, Italian, or what? Alice was well aware of the strength of political ties between members of an ethnic group, particularly in the East.

The Alva-Belmont House in Washington now is in a highcrime neighborhood—with the Senate Office Building adjacent, however, and the U.S. Supreme Court on an adjoining block. It was such a dangerous neighborhood when I was there that we could never carry our purses with us when we went out at night because of the probability of provoking attack. Most of the women there had been mugged at least once. Alva-Belmont House itself had been broken into two or three times. This was all laid at the door of the blacks. It is true that the neighborhood was nearly all black, but whether the crime had a racial cause or something else (drugs, for instance) was a question in my mind.

This attitude of Alice's however, seemed to be less a classical color prejudice than a consciousness of class that is almost benevolent with her, coupled with generalizing about people who, as she grew up, had been outside of her experience. Her close work with women from ethnic minorities is a matter of record.

Alice held other attitudes which colored her political outlook; at least they were her attitudes by the time I came to know her. She was non-partisan; personally, however, she seemed to trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats. This probably began or was reinforced in the suffrage struggle when Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic and recalcitrant president, became the object of her attack in "holding the party in power responsible" for defeats of the suffrage amendment. She also had a great fear of the machinations of communism and how it might manipulate her cause. She felt further that government was doing too much to help people who did not work; she deplored the welfare system—a view which is shared by many people of both parties, of course. Her views of these and many other social issues, however, seemed not to concern her unless they were related to the issue of the Equal Rights Amendment. While she had opinions about them, they held a low priority with her, and she did not spend time analyzing their causes and effects as broad societal manifestations. For instance, when we watched the television news in the living room at Belmont House, with our dinner trays brought in by the cook, Alice rarely commented on any news item unless it was of a senator or a congressman who had recently done something concerning the ERA. (or more likely who had not so recently done something.)

Alice talks rather fast and her voice is very even in tone, thus feeling and emotion come through muted. Her mannerisms in talking show an efficient energy at work at all times. There are no "uhs" or "ahs" in her speech. While she gropes for a word, she's absolutely silent. When a problem is presented to her, she simply sits silently for a minute; you wonder if she heard you. ("She has the quiet of a spinning top," wrote [Inez Hayes] Irwin.) Then she will lay out maybe eight or ten relevant points and conclude with a statement on the major focus.

Yet I have seen her upset about the twists and turns of the Equal Rights Amendment. She has a short laugh which seems on occasion to cover up despair. It might be considered a "bitter little laugh," except that Alice Paul doesn't sound bitter. She will laugh about things as though she sees the irony in a sudden twist of fate that has led to the wrong congressman getting on a committee, or a public issue like abortion suddenly coupled with the ERA in the press. A set-back in support brings from her a pause, then, "Well, then, here is what we must do." Frustrations seemed to lead to increased persistence and determination.

In Ridgefield, once we began recording, Alice had the same commitment to getting this story on tape that she had to the suffrage and ERA campaigns. She worked and worked and worked. Usually several attempts would be made before I could get her to take a break for lunch. By the second day, I had added two extension cords to the tape recorder to that her words could be captured at the dining table as well as in the study.

Finally, I stayed an additional day in order to finish—but Alice felt another was needed. Since another change in my schedule was impossible, we continued to work so that by nightfall we had wrapped up what we expected to be our last session. The recorder was turned off. Conversation came around to her genealogy. She mused on my maiden name, Roberts, and was certain that this signified a relation between herself and myself because she had a Roberts on her Quaker family tree. I was touched that she wanted to send me back to California with information on her forebears so that I could check records to confirm her conviction. But little did I suspect what this meant. The next morning Alice mentioned (in an off-hand way) that she had finally found the genealogy chart she was looking for, even though she had to hunt for it until four o'clock in the morning. This was alarming news in view of the health crisis of three days before. As I prepared to leave, the phone rang. A reporter wanted an interview on the ERA. Alice agreed. I knew she was going to go strong all day. As Scotty drove me to the airport, I extracted a promise. "For heaven's sake, Scotty, please let me know if Alice doesn't make it through the day." But we both knew she would.