Alice Paul

Alice Paul was the pivotal suffragist leader in the campaign that resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Following the completion of her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania-where she wrote a dissertation on the legal rights of women-Paul immersed herself in the women's suffrage movement. In 1916 she and Lucy Burns formed the National Women's Party and began using such public tactics as demonstrations, parades, picketing, and hunger strikes to spotlight their cause. Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson announced that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure," and strongly urged Congress to pass the necessary legislation. Having helped to secure the Nineteenth Amendment, Paul continued to support women's causes, notably as the original author of a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923.