Alice Paul, American activist (b. 1885)
Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in 1920.Paul often suffered police brutality and other physical abuse for her activism, always responding with non-violence and courage. She was jailed under terrible conditions in 1917 for her participation in a Silent Sentinels protest in front of the White House, as she had been several times during earlier efforts to secure the vote for women in England.
After 1920, Paul spent a half century as leader of the National Woman's Party, which fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Paul and Crystal Eastman, to secure constitutional equality for women. She won a large degree of success with the inclusion of women as a group protected against discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 alongside legal scholar Pauli Murray.