A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot

Reviewed by Jo Freeman

by Mary Walton
Published by Palgrave MacMillan, ©2010,  284 pp.

One hundred years ago, a fragile looking young woman disembarked from an ocean liner in Philadelphia to be greeted by her mother and a handful of reporters. During her two years of work for woman suffrage in Great Britain with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), headed by the controversial Emmeline Pankhurst, Alice Paul had become hot copy in her own country. In the next decade she would become even more so as she led the militant wing of the suffrage movement to victory in 1920.

A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot by Mary Walton chronicles her life through that momentous achievement, with a short Epilogue for the rest of her 92 years. The middle portion of her life was lived in relative obscurity, but before she died on July 9, 1977 she was celebrated widely for the cause she led after she returned to the US in 1910.

At that time the US suffrage movement was just beginning to emerge from years of “the doldrums” after gaining equal suffrage for women in four states in the 1890s. A victory in Washington State in November of 1910 brought the number to five. While the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was focused on attaining suffrage state by state, Alice Paul resolved to do it by Constitutional amendment.

Initially she persuaded NAWSA to make her the head of its Congressional Committee. In that capacity she staged a pageant on March 3, as Woodrow Wilson arrived in Washington for his inauguration the next day. Walton describes what happened in a chapter aptly entitled “I did not know men could be such Fiends.” 

She also addresses the matter of why the parade had a separate section for black women, a matter that has haunted feminists down to the present day. Turns out that who marched where was much more complicated than the decision of one woman to conform the public procession to the cultural norms of a Southern city, and it wasn’t all that segregated.

Paul soon formed her own organization, the Congressional Union, to push for a federal amendment. She started her own newspaper and raised her own funds. She did not consult with NAWSA on any of this, or even report on the activities of its Congressional Committee which she still headed. Not surprisingly, NAWSA’s leadership was not happy at this, and the two groups soon went their separate ways.

While Walton’s biography includes much on the organizations Paul headed and the women she worked with, NAWSA is mentioned mostly as an impediment to Paul’s work. One would never know that the women who worked on Carrie Chapman Catt’s winning plan were much of a factor in gaining the 19th Amendment.