Alice Paul

Social Work in New York City
(3 minutes)

"Now the next summer, after I graduated, I was asked by, I suppose, somebody in the School of Social Work--I'm not quite sure who asked me--to join the force of the Charity Organization Society. Did you ever hear of that? The Charity Organization Society, COS, they called it. And at that time I think in every city in the United States there was a COS. One of the lectures we had had--probably somebody in the lecture course that asked me to come. Somebody did.

So I spent all that summer working in New York for the Charity Organization Society. We were paid the tiniest little sum of money, perhaps enough just to pay your lodging, hardly anything at all. I worked in the office in my own section when I was living in the College Settlement. I kept on living at the College Settlement all summer although my scholarship was up, and I had this little salary from the Charity Organization Society. It was just a marvelous experience. I was assistant to an exceedingly experienced social worker, and I was just sent to this family and that family and the other family to see what their troubles were.

You see, then they couldn't get welfare [payments]; they couldn't get anything. The only thing anybody could get would maybe to get a church to help her or help him, or go to the Charity Organization Society, which was organizing all the existing welfare groups. They were all independent you see. Church groups and civic groups and any group that was organized to help people in distress were all federated in this Charity Organization Society. So you would be sent to somebody who was needing medical attention and then you would try to call up the hospitals and so on that she might be eligible for and get her in and get it for her. Just all day long. So you got to know the city of New York in places which were sort of the underground places--not underground, but the under layer of people who were up against it. So all that summer I stayed there."

Inspired to Help by the Opposition
(3 minutes, 32 seconds)

"Anyway she [Christabel Pankhurst] was a very young girl and a young lawyer, one of the few women that had ever studied law I guess in England at that time. Quite entrancing and delightful person, really very beautiful I thought. So she started to speak. And the students started to yell and shout, and I don't believe anybody heard one single word that Christabel said. So she kept on anyway for her whole speech. She was completely shouted down.

So I just became from that moment very anxious to help in this movement. You know if you feel some group that's your group is the underdog you want to try to help; it's natural I guess for everybody. When I had gone to the suffrage meetings in this country there was no oppositions at the meetings, everybody was in accord, all the Quakers were in accord. This had been one of their principles since Quakerism was started, you know: equality of the sexes. This is the only group I ever heard of that had it in their first principles, first enunciated back in 1684. It wasn't a subject for discussion. You just knew that there were many things in which the world hadn't come along and this was one that had to come along sometime. But here, when I saw this outbreak of hostility, I thought, "That's one group now I want to throw in all the strength I can give to help."

I went back to Woodbrook, and then I learned that Sir Oliver Lodge, who hadn't been at this meeting, was very aroused when he heard of this rowdyism in his college. (You see they had a totally different attitude than they have in this college here of giving way to all the rowdyism, which I think is a great mistake.) Anyway over there Sir Oliver Lodge didn't have any patience with it. He wasn't going to say, "Well, we want to give the students all the right to express themselves." [Laughter.] Not at all. He said, 'This is a great disgrace to the University of Birmingham. I call a meeting and all students--' I guess they were all required to attend this meeting, which would be conducted under his supervision. And it was. He was there and he was a great figure in English life, supposedly a most distinguished man. Christabel Pankhurst and her friends were invited to present their case, with many apologies from him to them, as to the unforgivable spectacle that the college had witnessed. I can tell you that no student would have dared to open his mouth at this meeting.

Well, then I understood everything about what the English militants were trying to do. She [Christabel Pankhurst] and the other young women who spoke with her--they were all three young girls--they had anyway one heart and soul convert--I don't know how many others they had. That was myself. The meeting was over, very decorous indeed, and that was all there was to it."

Involvement with the British Suffrage Movement
(54 seconds)

"Following or just preceding, anyway on this occasion, I became a member of the Women's Social and Political Union. You became a member by signing an application blank and giving 25 cents. I still remember my thrill at getting a letter from Mrs. Mabel Touk, the national treasurer I think she was, of the organization, a beautiful letter welcoming me into their ranks and thanking me for my 25 cents and so on. I was just so extremely happy to really be a part of it. Then I began to go to all their meetings. They had brief meetings every week in a big hall in London. The meetings were all oh, so enthusiastic."

Learning to Speak in Public
(3 minutes, 19 seconds)

Alice Paul: While I was at the School of Economics, I met one girl especially, her name was Rachel Barrett, I remember, who was a very ardent worker in the Women's Social and Political Union, as they called it, of Mrs. [Sylvia] Pankhurst's. I remember the first thing that I ever really did [for suffrage] while I was still at the School of Economics. This particular person, I think it was this Rachel Barrett, asked me if I would go out and help her in selling their paper, Votes for Women, in the street. So I did. I remember how very bold and good she was and how very timid and [laughing] unsuccessful I was, standing beside her trying to ask people to buy Votes for Women. So contrary to my nature really. I didn't seem to be very brave by nature. I remember very well doing this day after day after day, going down to the School of Economics, where she was a student and I was a student and other people were students, and we would just stand out in the street wherever we were supposed to stand, on some corner, with these Votes for Women. It is what they did all over London. A great many of the girls in all parts of London were doing it.

Amelia Fry: Did you get some hostile responses?

Alice Paul: Well, I don't remember anything about that. [Laughter] I don't know whether I did or not. I didn't think I was much of a success, but anyway I tried.

Then they began to ask me to speak outdoors at the street corners. Naturally they asked anybody, as I have always tried to do in our movement--to ask anybody to do anything that I could get them to do. So all we had to do was to tell what the movement was doing that week, what they were trying to do. I did speak, I guess, in a great many parts of London at little outdoor meetings, and indoor meetings when there was an election going on and they would meet in a schoolhouse perhaps and try to get all the people in that neighborhood to come in. The way you started, of course--they always started [new workers] by [having you] just introduce someone, someone who was an experienced speaker and would give you a little confidence so that you'd know you didn't have to go on; you could stop in a minute and now introduce the speaker. So that's the way I started, by introducing people. Then after a little while they would promote you to speaking yourself and having somebody introduce you--another new beginner.

We would go to the railroad stations in London and what they call the "tubes" (the subway) and in little parks. I don't know what we had for things to stand on, but they always had something we could stand on to be a little above the crowd.

March 3, 1913, Washington, D.C., Parade Excitement & Confusion
(3 minutes, 42 seconds)

"The next morning we went out early, very early, to try to begin to line the people up in all the different sections. We had a grand marshall who rode on horseback with several assistant marshalls on horseback, but they were more for publicity. The grand marshall was a Mrs. Burleson; you know at that time there was a Burleson in, I think, the cabinet of Mr. Wilson [Albert S. Burleson, Postmaster General]. Anyway she was a very prominent Texan family, Democratic family. I'm not absolutely sure what her relationship was to [Secretary] Burleson; her husband was an officer at Fort Meyer. So she came in and practiced and rehearsed and everything else and was an extremely decorative person on her horse.

But you couldn't do much because when we started out to form our people up, we had no place to form because the whole street was just--from one side to the other--was just filled with people. They were tourists, I would say, who had all come to see the inaugural and gotten there the day before. They were there, mothers and fathers and children, just a great mass of people who had no interest except in trying to see a woman's march. They couldn't any longer buy tickets [for the grandstands] because they were almost all exhausted I guess.

So when we started out we had this mass of people and we didn't know how to get through; we tried to get through and we just saw it couldn't be done. We could never have this procession of maybe one thousand women or five thousand or ten thousand (whatever we had); we'd never get them through.

So we went to the phone to call Mr. [Secretary of War] Stimson, and he said--I don't know who went, probably I went but I don't remember--he said all right, he would do just as he had agreed the night before, and he'd have the cavalry there as fast as they could get there.

So they came all on their horses, prancing around, and of course they could easily open the way, which they did, so we could go a block maybe; and then the way was all closed again and they'd have to open the next block. So that, as I told you the other night, the march which was supposed to end at Constitution Hall at a certain hour, it was hours later before we even came in sight of Constitution Hall.

We had the meeting there all right but on the way, for instance, there was this pageant of Hazel McKay's, which we had spent a great deal of effort on and it was apparently going to be extremely beautiful. So these poor people [waiting to see] the pageant--they had a separate grandstand built [for that], the sellers of this whole thing. Normally processions would go around in front of the White House, but this time they went in back of it so as to be opposite the Treasury and enable all the people who paid extra to have extra good seats [laughing] to see the pageant [laughter], so all these people thought they were paying extra to be in this place of advantage to see the pageant on the Treasury steps.

We had gotten very good publicity all the time we were getting up this procession because this Mrs. Helen Gardner I had gone to see turned out to be a super-whiz at this. She would arrive in the early morning and stay all day long and never budge and certainly she was 100% wonderful, I thought. Didn't see how anybody could have been better."

Miriam Allen deFord

Ernestine Hara Kettler

Jeannette Rankin

Sara Bard Field

Laura Elizabeth Seiler

Sylvie Thompson Thygeson