Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
She has been a master at concentration, a master strategist-a great
general. With passionate beliefs on all important social questions, she
resolutely set herself against being seduced into other paths. Far from
being naturally an ascetic, she has disciplined herself into denials
and deprivations, cultural and recreational, to pursue her objective
with the least possible waste of energy. Not that she did not want
above all else to do this thing. She did. But doing it she had to
abandon the easy life of a scholar and the aristocratic environment of
a cultured, prosperous, Quaker family, of Moorestown, New Jersey, for
the rigors of a ceaseless drudgery and frequent imprisonment. A flaming
idealist, conducting the fight with the sternest kind of realism, a
mind attracted by facts, not fancies, she has led fearlessly and with
magnificent ruthlessness. Thinking, thinking day and night of her
objective and never retarding her pace a moment until its
accomplishment, I know no modern woman leader with whom to compare her.
I think she must possess many of the same qualities that Lenin does,
according to authentic portraits of him-cool, practical, rational,
sitting quietly at a desk and counting the consequences, planning the
next move before the first one is finished. And if she has demanded the
ultimate of her followers, she has given it herself. Her ability to get
women to work and never to let them stop is second only to her own
unprecedented capacity for work.
Alice Paul came to leadership still in her twenties, but with a broad
cultural equipment. Degrees from Swarthmore, the University of
Pennsylvania, and special study abroad in English universities had
given her a scholarly background in history, politics, and sociology.
In these studies she had specialized, writing her doctor’s thesis on
the status of women. She also did factory work in English industries
and there acquired first hand knowledge of the industrial position of
women. In the midst of this work the English militant movement caught
her imagination and she abandoned her studies temporarily to join that
movement and go to prison with the English suffragists.
Convinced that the English women were fighting the battle for the women
of the world, she returned to America fresh from their struggle, to
arouse American women to action. She came bringing her gifts and
concentration to this one struggle. She came with that inestimable
asset, youth, and, born of youth, indomitable courage to carry her
point in spite of scorn and misrepresentation.
Among the thousands of telegrams sent Miss Paul the day the amendment
finally passed Congress was this interesting message from Walter Clark,
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, Southern
Democrat, Confederate Veteran and distinguished jurist:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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