The Story of the Woman's PartyGillmore, Inez Haynes
History
The Story of the Woman's Party
Gillmore, Inez Haynes
National Woman's Party; Paul, Alice, 1885-1977; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
It is very difficult to get Alice Paul to talk about herself. She is not
much interested in herself and she is interested, with every atom of
her, in the work she is doing. She will tell you, if you ask her, that
she was born in Moorestown, New Jersey, and then her interest seems to
die. She apparently does not remember herself very clearly either as a
child or a young girl. That is not strange. So intently has she worked
in the last eight years and so intensely has she lived in that work that
each year seems to have erased its predecessor. She is absolutely
concentrated on _now_. I asked Alice Paul once what converted her to
Woman Suffrage. She said that she could not remember when she did not
believe in it. She added, “You know the Quakers have always believed in
Woman Suffrage.”
Anne Herendeen, in a vivacious article on Alice Paul in _Everybody’s
Magazine_ for October, 1919, says, describing a visit to Moorestown:
“What do you think of all these goings-on?” I asked her mother. She
sighed.
“Well, Mr. Paul always used to say, when there was anything hard and
disagreeable to be done, ‘I bank on Alice.’”
The degree of education in Alice Paul’s life and the amount of social
service which she had performed are a little staggering in view of her
youth. Just the list of the degrees she achieved and the positions she
held before she started the National Woman’s Party covers a typewritten
page. They have even an unexpected international quality. One notes
first—and without undue astonishment—that she acquired a B.A. at
Swarthmore in 1905; an M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1907; a
Ph.D. at the same university in 1912. This would seem enough to fill the
educational leisure of most young women, but it does not by any means
complete Alice Paul’s student career. She was a graduate of the New York
School of Philanthropy in 1906. She was a student at the Woodbrooke
Settlement for Social Work at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, and in the
University of Birmingham, England, in 1907-08; a graduate student in
sociology and economics in the School of Economics of the University of
London in 1908-09.
She was, in addition, a Resident Worker of the New York College
Settlement in 1905-06; a Visitor for the New York Charity Organization
Society in the summer of 1906; a Worker in the Summer Lane Settlement,
and a Visitor in the Charity Organization Society of Birmingham,
England, during the winter of 1907-08; Assistant-secretary to the
Dalston Branch of the Charity Organization Society in London for a half
year in 1908; a Visitor for the Peel Institute for Social Work at
Clerkenwell, London, for a half year in 1908-09; a Resident Worker for
the Christian Social Union Settlement of Hoxton, London, in the summer
of 1908. She was also in charge of the Women’s Department of the branch
of adult schools at Hoxton in the summer of 1908.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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