The Two Searches for Alice Paul

Abstract

In 1972, after the Equal Rights Amendment had passed Congress, Alice Paul and I taped a nonstop, marathon oral history interview. The following year, with more research behind the questions, we continued with another marathon just as long. As part of the project, four other suffrage leaders and some rank-and-file organizers also taped oral histories. The papers of the organization Paul had led, the National Woman's Party (NWP), had been placed in the Library of Congress and were still unorganized because their status there was not yet permanent. The preparation for the interviews depended almost entirely on my reading of the weekly newspaper which the NWP had published since 1913, first called The Suffragist, then changed after 1920 to Equal Rights. We also used two books written in 1920 by fellow party members Inez Haynes Irwin and Doris Stevens, plus Emmeline Pankhurst's story of the early years of the suffragists in England. For the taping, then, we plodded doggedly year by year through the suffrage and Equal Rights Amendment campaigns, with some follow-up questions spurred by the small handful of books that had by then been published by William H. Chafe, William O'Neill, Aileen S. Kraditor, and of course Eleanor Flexner.1 Paul's own scholarly background (an M.A., a Ph.D., and three law degrees) was a large factor in propelling her through answers as systematic as she could make them; she had a sense of what scholars would want to know-and what she felt they needed to know-about the events mentioned in the sources at hand, and she knew how to respond to my own curiosity, which was based on hypotheses from the monographs. That was my first search for Alice Paul: she was narrat r, I was oral historian. This paper will compare my search as an oral historian intent on rescuing Alice Paul's life story for the archives of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley and the very different search that began five years later when I was faced with the new challenge of producing a biography for a publisher. Because such a biography has not yet appeared, many readers may not know exactly who Alice Paul was. Born in 1885, she was an American Quaker, a Swarthmore and University of Pennsylvania graduate who interned in social work in New York in 1905-06 and then worked in the mili-