Dissertation Prospectus Defense
The name Alice Paul (1885-1977) has recently become en vogue to a new generation of women. Recently, the Broadway hit musical Suffs, based on Alice Paul and the women’s suffrage movement, won two Tony Awards and continues to make the rounds of morning shows due to its popularity and catchy tunes such as the showstopping anthem, “Keep Marching!”[1] Subsequently, the recently ratified Equal Rights Amendment, in which Alice Paul co-authored the first draft, is the subject of news stories and debate due to its current political and legal status. Scholars have been interested in the women’s suffrage movement as an academic subject since the late 1950s, and Paul gained attention as a subject in the 1960s and 70s, not surprisingly, during the second wave of feminism. Born in 1885 to a devout Quaker family, Paul lived her early life in a protected bubble in the Quaker community of Moorestown, New Jersey. Her family’s only source of news was the Quaker periodical The Intelligencer, and the only people outside of the community she encountered were her family’s Irish maids, whom she found to have a peculiar way of life. She chose a Quaker undergraduate college experience and did not come into contact with the secular world until she began her social work career internships before graduating from Swarthmore college, at which time she traveled to Europe after graduation in 1907. There, this shy and awkward young woman would find her life’s purpose after a happenstance meeting with the infamous militant suffrage fighters, the Pankhurst family. In her ninety-two years of life, she would make connections with American presidents, world leaders, militant rebels, and millionaires in her quest for suffrage and equality, while faithfully upholding the tenets of the Quaker faith.
Utilizing a methodology of religious, political, and social history, this study will incorporate letters, diaries, educational documents, church documents, an official oral history, photographs, and business correspondence to question if and how Paul’s Quaker faith influenced her path to suffrage work from her early life to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1885-1920). It will examine any possible influence of her family, community, and their collective Quaker way of life. It will question the value of her Quaker education in elementary school, high school, and college. It will investigate the possible Quaker influence on her employment as a social worker. It will inquire about the possible clash between suffrage ideology and Quaker beliefs, and how she may have reconciled them to continue her work. It will examine the series of serendipitous events, involving a scholarship to a Quaker retreat, that unfolded to put her in England at the right place at the right time. Her two years in England is another under-researched area, which gaps this study will seek to fill by retracing her steps. Finally, it will question any influence of the Pankhurst family on her suffrage ideology and how her rebellious actions and faith may have collided during her two-year stay in England.
There are several published biographies of Alice Paul, as well as PhD dissertations that focus on different aspects and periods of Paul’s life and work. None, however, focus entirely on the possible influence of the Quaker faith on her suffrage work.[2] This author’s previous research on a master’s thesis involved the Victorian and Constitutional suffragists of the British women’s suffrage movement and the newly incorporated tactics of the Pankhurst women. It found that the militant movement hurt the cause, setting them back from winning the franchise until after the First World War.[3] This research is a significant connection to the American women’s suffrage movement, and specifically, Alice Paul since she worked with the Pankhurst family for two years, and was only one of two Americans in that fight. She brought back strategies and tactics to use in the American movement. It is important to note that Paul’s suffrage work was conducted during the Progressive period in American history, which may be an influence in its own right. The Victorian way of life had ended, fashions were changing, and women were stepping outside the boundaries of preconceived notions of femininity to work for causes close to their hearts. Religious women pooled their strengths and resources to incorporate causes important to them in their charitable organizations, including suffrage. The goal is to offer a different side to Alice Paul, not the media representation of the woman who was force-fed in prison and branded a rebel and militant. Paul had a reverent and introspective side guided by her conscience that gets pushed by the wayside for the more flashy aspects of her life such as her fight for equality and the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment in her later years. Her simple life choices and other public displays make Alice Paul’s religious affiliation and the possible Providential influence on her life’s work a valid and necessary research perspective to add to the historiographical canon of suffrage studies.
[1] Shaina Taub, “Marching On” from Suffs the Musical, https://youtu.be/d5_t8NPC67I?si=MS5OOg0iuvQN3IWn
[2] For an overview of Alice Paul’s life, see J.D. Zahnizer and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[3] Alice L. Alvarado, “The British Women’s Suffrage Movement: Understanding How the Victorian Campaign and the Constitutional Suffragists Influenced and Won the Representation of the People Act of 1918” (master’s thesis, American Military University, 2013).