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For Alice, Who Broke Both Tradition and the Sexist, Racist President. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-27
The President
The President is clearly a racist, who has a lifelong history of discrimination against African Americans, and he has appointed racists to his cabinet, supported racist propaganda, and reversed diversity in hiring across the Federal government. But he also clearly views women as second class citizens, promoting stereotypes while opposing basic rights for women. He’s well known for detentions and deportations of foreigners, who he says are mixed up with dangerous radicals and anti-government protesters. Despite this small, restricted view of America, the President hypocritically speaks publicly about how great the country is compared to the rest of the world.
His Opposition is Off Balance
There’s currently a backlash against the perceived gains of African Americans, immigrants in the labor force, and women who have been challenging their traditional roles and demanding equality. President Wilson was elected by conservative white men angered and threatened by social progress. White nationalists are trying to control the narrative, with the racist film The Birth of a Nation becoming the first film screened at the White House.
Racist violence is on the rise, with Wilson’s tacit approval, and race relations are at a nadir. Native Americans are not even US citizens yet, so they have no voice in the government that controls their lives. Women, whose rights movement got derailed by the Civil War, are trying to rebuild in a time that feels hostile to them. The old guard of Feminists are seen as shrill, unattractive, masculine battle-axes who hate men and oppose traditional marriage.
The Iconoclast
The fainting couch where women, after releasing their tight corsets, would often pass out as the blood rushed back into circulation.
Women, who had once ruled kingdoms in the old world, were struggling with unfair limitations and absurd expectations, objectified and admired, while not being heard. Men dictated their roles and dismissed their concerns. When forced to listen, men were patronizing and relegated women’s views to the background, cementing their second-class citizenship through a consistent campaign of deferral and delay. The idea of women having the right to vote was considered equivalent to giving cats the right to vote.
Enter Alice Paul, daughter of a suffragist, Quaker, BS Swarthmore, LSE, and MA/ PhD U Penn, who knew and was determined to ensure that the patriarchy would yield to women. Like Queen Elizabeth I, Alice devoted herself to leading her cause, eschewing intimate or family relationships to focus 100%. Alice knew the women’s movement needed a new approach, a new face and a bold new goal. So she challenged the women’s leaders to campaign for a constitutional amendment to give women the vote, and to begin, she organized a parade.
The Wonder Woman
Inez Milholland’s image of feminine power became an iconic American image which inspired the comic character Wonder Woman.
For the face of her new movement, Alice chose Inez Milholland, a beautiful young woman, outfitted her in classic Joan of Arc style and placed her on a white horse for the parade. (The frumpy old veterans who campaigned with Anthony & Stanton rode in a car.) Alice included women from all walks of life, including young women, privileged women, manual laborers, native women like future lawyer Marie Baldwin, and black women like Ida B. Wells. Banners were created in gold, white and violet, with the first letters symbolizing ‘Give Women the Vote’. Even the disparaging cat memes, once used to criticize women’s rights as silly, were repurposed as popular images reminding everyone how people love cats and think they are both cute and smart.
The Clash
The parade was both a popular success and a scandal. Ida B. Wells chose to join midway, rather than march in the back to appease southern state delegations. Insults were hurled, bottles were thrown, and then punches, as the police did little to protect the marchers.
When the main women’s movement refused to back her aggressive national campaign, Alice Paul started a new women’s movement. For two and a half years, the suffragists campaigned in front of the White House, in heat, rain and snow, holding the powerful to account, regardless of popular sentiments, leaving no doubt as to their principled moral stance. Silently, they stood holding banners quoting Wilson’s own hypocritical statements about Democracy and asking when he would grant it to American women.
Inez Milholland campaigned across country, but she collapsed on the campaign trail and died in 1916, much to the dismay of Alice, who had encouraged her to keep campaigning despite her exhaustion.
“Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?” — Last words of Inez Milholland, age 30.
The War
When the Great War broke out and especially when the US finally joined, the expectation was that the movement was over, delayed for another generation. Nobody would dare protest against a wartime President. Except for Alice.
The police began arresting protestors for ‘obstructing traffic’, and the young suffragists were sent to a work prison for months. Over 200 American women were thrown in jail to win the right of women to vote. They were beaten unconscious, hosed, isolated, denied representation and held incommunicado from the media.
Alice and Lucy, who served hard time with 200 other suffragists to win the right to vote for women.
Alice and her friend and compatriot Lucy Burns were familiar with the harsh repression and political prisoner tactics, having met in London and trained with Emmeline Pankhurst—of Mary Poppins’ Sisters Suffragette fame—in Scotland. On her third imprisonment and hunger strike overseas, Alice had been force-fed. While Americans believed their movement to be more civil than the brutality of the suffragist conflict in the UK, Alice and Lucy knew what they were getting into.
Imprisoned in Virginia, refusing to pay bail to maintain her innocence as a political prisoner, Alice led a hunger strike here, and again, she was brutally force-fed multiple times, causing permanent health damage. But with the help of a politically connected fellow inmate, she got word of the mistreatment out to the media.
Wilson Broken
After years of women campaigning in elections against him, women gradually gaining the right to vote in western states, and after seeing daily protests on his lawn showing the empty hypocrisy of his lies, this new scandalous treatment of Alice Paul and 200 others shook his administration. Women had long been part of America’s war efforts, from Molly Pitcher in the Revolution, to Clara Barton in the Civil War, to the women who served in Wilson’s war effort, a generation before the Rosies of WWII. Wilson could simply not afford to continue to defer or delay the rights of women, when he needed a unified nation. So he endorsed the 19th Amendment in 1918.
The Last Vote, for Mom
Ratification came down to one vote in Tennessee, as an opponent received a telegram from his mother. Chagrined, he changed his vote, and the Amendment passed in 1920.
Of course, native women would have to wait until 1924 for citizenship, and practically speaking, black people would have to wait until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s to be more widely enfranchised. But the 19th Amendment is a fundamental win for a country where women’s rights went backwards for a century after the founding.
Not Done
Alice was not done. She felt strongly that America also needed an Equal Rights Amendment, which she helped draft and campaigned for for decades. She correctly predicted that the imposition of a time limit would prevent it from becoming law, due to delay tactics.
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.” — Section 1 of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Learning from or Whitewashing History
A Vanderbilt divorcee, Alva Belmont, bought a historic DC home for the movement in the 1920s, and President Obama declared the site a national monument. I learned the story a bit in history class, but more by visiting the site and later watching the HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank as Alice Paul. (Sorry, I’ve basically spoiled the movie here, but it’s still well-worth watching for to see the true story well dramatized.)
Unfortunately, despite having a number of exhibits about women of color in the small museum in DC, due to the maladministration, the rangers no longer discuss race in the tour, unless explicitly asked about it. If I had not asked about Sojourner Truth, Mary Terrell and Ida B. Wells, then those women’s rights leaders and their important role in women’s constitutional right to vote would not have been told to our tour group. And this is not the first time this year that I’ve gone through the same experience, with another docent telling me, “we’ve been asked not to talk about race, unless visitors bring it up”. Make no mistake, this self-censoring, white-washing of our American history began this year, based on my visits of hundreds of sites across the country in the past three years.
Thank you
Thank you for reading. I recently unpublished a post calling the President’s policies insane, after it received only a few likes. In retrospect, I suppose the points were obvious to folks like you who pay attention to the news. If you enjoy reading my posts comparing historic figures with current challenges, then please recommend and share this one too.
One strange personal realization I had in the museum was how relatively rare it was for me to see a woman’s head in marble, besides some idealized mythological woman, like Venus, Lady Liberty or Justice. There are not enough real women recognized fully for their contributions to our country, history and world. I hope that we can now recognize the very real women in history who fought, bled and died for our rights, rather than consigning women to some mythological pedestal, male-defined roles or restricting our sisters only to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen in silence. And enough with the whitewashing, please. Thanks.
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