Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

The National Woman's Party (NWP) was both militant and radically feminist in its battle for a national woman suffrage amendment between 1913 and 1919. Years of effort in state suffrage fights by the major organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), had yielded little result, and by 1912, the issue was a stagnant one. Only five western states had given women the vote, and virtually nothing was being done for a national suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Anna Howard Shaw, NAWSA president and heir to pioneer Susan B. Anthony, was proving an ineffectual leader, and unlike her nineteenth-century predecessor, did not have a militant bone in her body. Seeking to breathe life into the complacent movement, the new suffragists looked elsewhere for inspiration, adopting the British brand of militancy to the American situation in their own particular nonviolent style. ¹

Led by its “Chairman” Alice Paul, the NWP (first called the “Congressional Union”) tried a spirited but unsuccessful campaign of aggressive congressional lobbying, and then organized women of the western states to vote in a bloc against the Democratic Party in the 1914 and 1916 elections. As the National Woman's Party, they confronted the Wilson administration with incessant picketing and protests, resulting in eventual imprisonment.

By 1917, these suffragists were joined by hundreds of committed women, including a large and enthusiastic contingent of radical women from the political Left. One of the first groups ever to employ tactics of classic nonviolent resistance in their protests, the Woman's Party intended their

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