Alice Paul (1885-1977);
Alice Paul at National Woman's Party
Headquarters, c. 1917.
Courtesy, New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, NJ.

Alice Paul (1885-1977) of Mount Laurel became a militant suffragist while a graduate student in London from 1908 to 1910. On returning to the United States, she became an advocate of the suffrage amendment to the U. S. Constitution. She worked with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and then through the Congressional Union and the National Woman's Party (NWP), organizations she founded. The NWP became the radical wing of the suffrage movement and led picketing of the White House from 1917 to 1919. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Paul turned the NWP toward the goal of equal rights for women. She first introduced the federal Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and worked for the rest of her life to try to achieve its passage.