Alice Paul
Alice Paul was a successful women's rights reformer in the Progressive Era. She showed success through her National Association of Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman's Party (NWP). Under these parties, she's gone through victories that include the suffrage parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House Pickets, and hunger strikes. All these reforms by Alice Paul have led to the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Alice Paul was an American born on January 11, 1885 in Moorestown, New Jersey. Paul grew up in a family that was committed to social justice. Her mother, Tacie Parry, influenced her by belonging to the Quaker values of discipline, service, honesty, and equality between the sexes. Her mother took Paul to her first suffrage meeting when she was a child. When her father died, she left home to attend Swarthmore College where she studied biology. She got into politics and economics when she was in her senior year. In 1905, she graduated from Swarthmore. Paul then spent a year there studying social work. She then later earned a master's degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She became interested in the problems of women's inferior legal status. Then, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1912 from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the legal status of women, and a law degree in 1922 from Washington College of Law. In 1928, she got a second Ph.D. in law from the American University. While she was studying at the University of Birmingham, Christabel Pankhurst, the daughter of the famous British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, wasn't allowed to address a university audience about woman suffrage because of the hostile crowd. Paul was shocked and could not believe people would react this way towards a suffrage such as women's rights. On the invitation of the Charity Organization Society of London, she became a caseworker in Dalston and attended her first suffrage parade there in 1908. For the next two years, she...
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