The Story of the Woman's Party

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

“What do you think of all these goings-on?” I asked her mother. She sighed.

“Well, Mr. Paul always used to say, when there was anything hard and disagreeable to be done, ‘I bank on Alice.’”

The degree of education in Alice Paul’s life and the amount of social service which she had performed are a little staggering in view of her youth. Just the list of the degrees she achieved and the positions she held before she started the National Woman’s Party covers a typewritten page. They have even an unexpected international quality. One notes first—and without undue astonishment—that she acquired a B.A. at Swarthmore in 1905; an M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1907; a Ph.D. at the same university in 1912. This would seem enough to fill the educational leisure of most young women, but it does not by any means complete Alice Paul’s student career. She was a graduate of the New York School of Philanthropy in 1906. She was a student at the Woodbrooke Settlement for Social Work at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, and in the University of Birmingham, England, in 1907-08; a graduate student in sociology and economics in the School of Economics of the University of London in 1908-09.

She was, in addition, a Resident Worker of the New York College Settlement in 1905-06; a Visitor for the New York Charity Organization Society in the summer of 1906; a Worker in the Summer Lane Settlement, and a Visitor in the Charity Organization Society of Birmingham, England, during the winter of 1907-08; Assistant-secretary to the Dalston Branch of the Charity Organization Society in London for a half year in 1908; a Visitor for the Peel Institute for Social Work at Clerkenwell, London, for a half year in 1908-09; a Resident Worker for the Christian Social Union Settlement of Hoxton, London, in the summer of 1908. She was also in charge of the Women’s Department of the branch of adult schools at Hoxton in the summer of 1908.

I asked Mabel Vernon, who went to Swarthmore with her, about Alice Paul. Her impressions were a little vague—mainly of a normal, average young girl who had not yet begun to “show.” She remembered that, although biology was her specialty, Miss Paul was catholic in her choice of courses; how—as though it were something she expected to need—she took a great deal of Latin; and that—as though at the urge of the same intuition—she devoted herself to athletics. She had apparently no athletic gifts; yet before she left Swarthmore she was on the girls’ varsity basketball team, was on her own class hockey team, and had taken third place in the women’s tennis tournament. She was a rosy, rounded, vigorous-looking girl then. When Mabel Vernon saw her next, she had been hunger-striking in England and was thin to the point of emaciation.

I asked Alice Paul herself about her work with the poor in England. She said, looking back on it—and it is apparently always a great effort for her to remove her mental vision from the present demand—that her main impression was of the hopelessness of it all, that there seemed nothing to do but sweep all that poverty away. The thing that she remembers especially now is that they were always burying children.

The first great, outstanding fact of Alice Paul’s training is that in the English interregnum which divided her American education, she joined the Pankhurst forces. In the beginning all her work was of the passive kind. She attended meetings and ushered. She was about to go home; indeed she had bought her passage when the Pankhursts asked her to join a deputation to Parliament. This deputation, which consisted of more than a hundred women, and was led by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, was arrested at the entrance to Parliament. They were detained in the policemen’s billiard room of the Cannon Row Police Station, the only place at that station large enough to hold so many women.

The second great outstanding fact of Alice Paul’s career in England is that she met Lucy Burns.

Lucy Burns was born in Brooklyn. The facts of her education, although superficially not so multitudinous as those of Alice Paul, are even more impressive in point of international quality. She was graduated from Packer Institute in 1899 and from Vassar College in 1902. She studied at Yale University in 1902-03, at the University of Berlin in 1906-08, at the University of Bonn in 1908-09. She joined the Woman’s Social and Political Union of London in 1909 and she worked as an organizer in Edinburgh and the east of Scotland in 1909-12.

Lucy Burns thinks she first met Alice Paul at a Suffrage demonstration. Alice Paul thinks she first met Lucy Burns in that same policemen’s billiard room of the Cannon Row Police Station, London. Both these young women remember their English experiences in flashes and pictures. They worked too hard and too militantly to keep any written record; and successive hardships wiped away all traces of their predecessors. At any rate, Alice Paul says that she spoke to Miss Burns because she noticed that she wore a little American flag. Sitting on the billiard table, they talked of home. Alice Paul also says that Lucy Burns, a student at that time of the University of Bonn in Germany, had come to England for a holiday. She entered the militant movement a few weeks after she landed and this was her first demonstration.