Alice Paul
Alice
Paul's suffrage activities started during her time in England. While in
London (1906-09) she worked in a settlement house and was jailed on three
occasions for suffragist actions. Back in the United States, in 1912, she
became the chairperson of the congressional committee of the National American
Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). However, by 1913 she had become impatient
with its policies, so she helped to found the
more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (which
merged in 1917 to form the National Woman's Party). She was the chief organizer
of the 1913 NAWSA Congressional Committee's Inauguration Parade in Washington
DC. She was single-minded in her commitment to get the vote for women, she
endured much adversity which included, being jailed, waging a hunger strike
in prison, hospitalization, being force-fed and even treated as insane.
After women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment, she devoted herself to gaining equal rights for women and in 1923 introduced the first Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. Even though she did not see the ERA Amendment ratified, she did play a pivotal role in getting an equal rights affirmation in the preamble to the United Nations charter.
Alice Paul was a highly educated woman. She studied a Swarthmore College, took her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912 and by 1922 she also had a law degree from Washington College. Read oral history Conversations With Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Click here to listen to audio excerpts from Alice Paul's oral history.
Mabel Vernon met Alice Paul while they were students at
Swarthmore College in the early 1900s. It was Alice Paul's invitation to work with her at
the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in 1913 that initiated Vernon's full-time
devotion to the cause. She became the CU's first national suffrage organizer, and, in
1914, was sent to Nevada to work with suffragist Anne Martin in the campaign for
ratification of that state's suffrage amendment. In 1915 she arranged Sara Bard Field's
transcontinental auto campaign for woman suffrage. Vernon's interruption of President
Woodrow Wilson's speech on July 4, 1916, was one of the suffragists' first acts of
militancy. In May 1917 she participated in a small commission that met with the President
to demand support for a federal suffrage amendment. She was among the first suffragists to
be arrested for picketing the White House, and spent three days in the District of
Columbia jail. After her release she traveled through the mid-western and northwestern
states to educate the public about the goals of the NWP. She served as campaign manager
for the 1918 and 1920 senatorial campaigns of Anne Martin. Vernon's skill in public
speaking, and her ability to make a strong fundraising pitch, were some of the qualities
for which she was most noted. 
Jeannette
Rankin was both a suffragist and a pacifist. She worked for women's causes
and the peace movement throughout her lifetime. As a suffrage organizer,
Ms. Rankin helped win the vote for women in Montana in 1914. She then served
as a National American Woman Suffrage Association field secretary. She lobbied
for suffrage in fifteen states across the nation. In 1916, she started her
campaign for Congress and in 1917 she became the first woman elected to
the U.S. House of Representatives. Standing firm on her pacifist beliefs
she voted against entering World War I. Also during her term in the House
in 1941-43, she was the only member of Congress to vote against entering
World War II. She continued to lobby for peace in later years, particularly
during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In 1967 in her honor a group of women
formed the Jeannette Rankin Brigade to oppose the Vietnam War. Real oral
history 
Sara Bard
Field first became involved in the campaign for woman suffrage in Portland,
Oregon, where she joined the Oregon College Equal Suffrage League and
worked as the paid state organizer for the campaign that won suffrage
in that state in 1912. Field became known as an eloquent orator when she
canvassed the state during the summers of 1911 and 1912. The following
two years, 1913-1914, she assisted the Nevada suffrage campaign. Having
grown emotionally and politically distant from her husband, a Baptist
minister, she divorced him in late 1914, over his pronounced objection;
he moved to Berkeley, California, with their two children, who became
his custody following the divorce. 
Born in 1897 in New York City, Rebecca Hourwich was the daughter
of Isaac Hourwich, a noted economist and authority on immigration and
Russian-American law. She was sixteen years old when she marched in the
Woman's Party Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., in 1913, and was only
eighteen years old when she campaigned for the Suffrage referendum in
New Jersey. She later took charge of the Brockton district for the Massachusetts
Woman's Suffrage party. She took part in the picketing of the White House
in 1917, and, that same year, traveled to the South to tell about the
arrests of the suffragists. Reyher headed the Boston office of the National
Woman's Party in 1918, the New York office from 1918 to 1919, the Washington,
D.C., headquarters in 1921, and the NWP headquarters in Chicago in 1923.
She served on the board of the NWP from 1927 to 1929. 
Helen
Valeska Bary's suffrage involvement was primarily in southern California
where she worked with the Los Angeles Political Equality League to get the
Suffrage Amendment passed in California. She was the general secretary for
the Political Equality League in 1910 and 1911. Ms. Bary went on to have
a long career in social welfare administration. She worked at a variety
of agencies such as the United States Children's Bureau, and the California
State Department of Social Welfare, until she joined the newly formed Social
Security Administration in 1935. Read oral history 
Born
near Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1894, Burnita Shelton Matthews trained
to be a musician, but had always wanted to study the law. So she moved
to Washington, D.C., where, in 1920, she received her law degree from
the National University (later consolidated with George Washington University).
While attending law school, Matthews learned about the National Woman's
Party, and participated in picketing the White House on many occasions.
"It was amazing in those days how some of the people felt about women
picketing," Matthews recalled. "On one of those occasions when I wasn't
doing anything but just carrying a banner, someone who was watching the
parade came up and said, 'What are you being paid for this?' They used
to say things like that." 
Born into an agnostic, anarchist Jewish family in a suburb of
Craiova, Rumania in 1896, Ernestine Hara Kettler immigrated to the United
States in 1907. Her father's death left her family without any money, and
her mother went to work in a New York sweatshop. Kettler was thirteen when
she began associating with the Young People's Socialist League, attended
political meetings in Union Square, and joined strikes when the opportunity
arose. Displaying a gift for writing, members of the local Labor Temple
offered Kettler wealthy sponsors who provided her a private education, first
at an academy in Massachusetts, and later at an academy in Oberlin, Ohio.
Still, Kettler was drawn to the community of radical activists in New York,
where she associated with members of the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and the writers
and artists of Provincetown, including Eugene O'Neill and Louise Bryant.
She was at a Socialist convention in 1917 when somebody told her about the
National Woman's Party and invited her to go to Washington, D. C. to join
the picketing of President Wilson. "Of course, anything as exciting
as that would have appealed to me," she recalled. She was twenty-one
years old, the youngest of the three other suffragists with whom she was
then arrested on September 22, 1917, for "obstructing traffic."
She was sentenced to thirty days at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia--an
experience that would haunt her for the rest of her life. "I felt horrified
by the different things that could happen to you in prison," she remembered,
and though she wanted to go back to the picket line again, as she recalled,
she "just wasn't courageous enough." In the years that followed,
Kettler continued to be politically active, especially within the labor
movement. She joined the Socialist Workers Party in the late 1930s and worked
for the Office Employees Union. In the 1940s she worked for the waterfront
union and later the AFL. She joined the National Organization for Women
in the late 1960s. At the time she was interviewed in 1973 for the Suffragist
Oral History Series, she was seventy-seven years old. Read oral history
Born
in 1886 of "pioneer stock" in Pueblo, Colorado, Jessie Haver
Butler had a difficult childhood. Her mother, an unconventional woman
who participated in the suffrage campaign in 
Reflecting
on her life at the age of 104, Sylvie Thygeson commented, "I was
interested in every kind of social problem that came my way." Born
in 1868, Sylvie Thygeson grew up in the small town of Forreston, Illinois.
Her parents provided her an open-minded environment where discussion of
social issues was encouraged. Her mother was an avid reader and a supporter
of woman's suffrage; her father a lawyer who loved to talk about politics.
Thygeson's family moved to St. Paul in 1884, following the death of her
father. It was in St. Paul that Thygeson eventually became active in the
Woman's Welfare League, which invited guest speakers--including on at
least one occasion, Sara Bard Field--to their weekend luncheon meetings
to educate their members on the topics of suffrage, birth control, and
"any of the things that belonged to women." Thygeson also hosted
small tea parties in her home where she would talk about women's issues
and answer questions. These informal "parlor" gatherings were
particularly effective, she recalled, because they would attract women
who would not otherwise attend a lecture or more formal event. Inspired
by Margaret Sanger, Thygeson made a conscious decision to limit her own
family by using birth control. With two associates, Thygeson defied the
law that at that time outlawed distribution of birth control by organizing
a birth control clinic in St. Louis. Sylvie Thygeson died in 1975, almost
107 years old. Read oral history 
Laura
Elizabeth Seiler's suffrage activities started during her college years.
In 1912 while at Cornell, she started the Suffrage Club and during this
same period she participated in various suffrage parades. After graduating
from college, she continued to promote the suffrage cause by organizing
the movement in the western counties of New York. She traveled through
the counties and did "street speaking" from the back of her
car. Shortly after this, she took a position as the head of the Women's
Political Union Speakers' Bureau. Using her training in public speaking
that she had received while at Cornell, she coached volunteer speakers
who would go out and speak on the street corners. She was involved in
some of the more daring acts during the Suffrage Movement such as the
New York Harbor incident where a group of women carrying banners sailed
a boat through the harbor. She also gave a speech atop a horse on Wall
Street. Seiler went on to have a long career as an account executive in
the advertising field. She worked from 1917-1948 for the Federal Advertising
Agency, working her way up from Copywriter to Account Executive, to Vice-President
and member of Board of Directors. Read oral history 
From
the early age of 14 Miriam Allen deFord started working at the woman's suffrage
headquarters in Philadelphia. She continued to participate in the movement
by overseeing their public relations and by participating in parades in
Philadelphia and in New York. She continued her suffrage activities when
she moved to Boston. Between 1912-1915 she was "soapboxing" for
the suffragist cause for the Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Society. She
went on to be a writer and was very involved in radical political activities
in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in 1920. Both with Maynard Shipley,
her husband, and independently, she played an active role in the major radical
causes of the day. She helped Shipley organize the Science League of America
during the anti-evolution fights of the 1920s. Her published writings range
from poetry and verse in Scribners, Harpers, Woman Voter,
to murder mystery stories, science fiction, book reviews for the San
Francisco Chronicle, and biographies. In addition, she worked as one
of the first (if not the first) female insurance claims adjusters. She died
in 1975. Read oral history