1909: When NJ Quaker Alice Paul was Arrested, Jailed and Force-fed in England

When Alice Stokes Paul was born in Moorestown, New Jersey on January 11th, 1885, no one could have imagined that she would lead, along with her friend Lucy Burns, a successful campaign that resulted in the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote in the U.S. federal election of 1920.

Her unwavering Quaker-bred convictions literally took her to the gates of the White House, where she helped to defend for all Americans the right to freedom of assembly and expression - even in time of war.

Alice´s parents, William M. Paul and Tacie Parry, were free-thinking members of the Society of Friends, and they instilled in Alice a strong belief in honesty, self-discipline, social justice and gender equality.

Her grandfather, Judge William Parry, was one of a committee of Quakers from New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meetings who founded Swarthmore College as a co-educational Quaker school in 1864.

Her Mother, Tacie, was one of the first women to attend Swarthmore, and she took Alice to her first suffrage meeting when she was just a child.

Alice´s home was a "gentleman´s farm" since her father was a successful businessman and president of the Burlington County Trust Company in Moorestown. She attended Moorestown Friends School (Est. 1785) until she was 16 and her father died of pneumonia.

In 1901 she left home to attend Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She studied biology "because she knew nothing about it", according to one biographer, and took courses in politics and economics before graduating in 1905.

While earning a master's degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, she became interested in the problems raised by women's inferior legal status.

In the fall of 1907, Paul interrupted her graduate studies at Penn to accept a fellowship in social work at the Quaker training school in Woodbridge, England.

While in Birmingham, England, Alice saw an unruly crowd taunting a female speaker and stopped to observe the chaos. The woman, who had been speaking about women's suffrage, was jeered so loudly she couldn't be heard and was forced from the stage.

Alice introduced herself to the speaker, who turned out to be Christabel Pankhurst, a daughter of England´s most radical suffragist: Emmeline Pankhurst.

The Pankhurst women (the other daughter was Sylvia) were leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union, (WSPU) a militant faction of suffragists whose motto was "Deeds not words." They knew that prayer, petitions, and patience would never be enough to successfully enfranchise women.

They also believed that the party in power should be held responsible for women's secondary status. Therefore, the Pankhursts and their followers confronted cabinet ministers as often as possible, shouting questions during their speeches, and creating enough of a disturbance to be arrested.

Their notoriety gained them front-page coverage in many London newspapers, especially when they were shown being carried away in handcuffs by the police.

For the next two years, Alice Paul worked closely with WSPU, learning and participating in the more militant strategies of British feminism.

On one such outing, Alice met Lucy Burns, a well-educated Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, who was also being arraigned in a London police station. Lucy had graduated from Vassar College in 1902, and over the next seven years, she did graduate work in linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, and at the Universities of Berlin, Bonn, and Oxford.

On the women´s suffrage front, Burns had already earned a special medal from the Pankhursts for the bravery she exhibited in the course of several demonstrations, arrests, and hunger strikes.

On Lord Mayor´s Day, November 9th, 1909, the annual dinner banquet for British Cabinet Members was scheduled to be held at Guild Hall. Alice Paul and Amelia Brown, another suffragist, disguised themselves as cleaning women, and carrying buckets and brushes entered Guild Hall with the rest of the staff at 9:00 a.m. They hid themselves in a gallery adjacent to the great hall until evening. "It was a weary vigil" Alice said later, "but it paid."

"The Prime Minister (Herbert Henry Asquith) made a most eloquent speech and I listened, waiting for a chance to break in. At last there came a pause. Summoning all my strength, I shouted at the top of my voice: "How about votes for women?"

"You would have thought I had thrown a bomb. There was serious disorder, but Mr. Asquith was the most startled of all. You see the hall was guarded by a cordon of police and he felt safe from interruption. While the officers searched for me he stood like a statue. I was found and arrested and imprisonment followed."

Alice was not the only American at the Guild Hall demonstration. Lucy Burns arrived in evening dress, and managed to get inside the banqueting room. As Winston Churchill was passing by with his wife, Miss Burns, waving a tiny banner in his face, asked him: "How can you dine here while women are starving in prison?"

Alice was charged with throwing stones through a stained glass window, a charge she denied, and sentenced to a month's hard labor at Holloway Jail. During two previous incarcerations, Alice refused to eat, once going without food for five days. That tactic led to her early release both times.

At Holloway, Alice refused to wear prison clothes or perform the hard labor she was sentenced to do, but when she refused to eat the authorities decided to feed her by force. Alice described it this way:

"Twice each day I was wrapped in blankets and taken to another cell to be fed. During this operation, the largest wardress in Holloway sat astride my knees, holding my shoulders down to keep me from bending forward. Two other wardresses sat on either side and held my arms. Then a towel was placed around my throat and one doctor from behind forced my head back, while another doctor put a tube in my nostril. When it reached my throat my head was pushed forward. Twice the tube came through my mouth and I got it between my teeth. My mouth was then pried open with an instrument. Sometimes they tied me to a chair with sheets."

After her return to the United States in 1910, Paul described her force-feeding to an audience at Cooper Union in New York: "It always caused my nose to bleed and brought out perspiration all over me. I had fits of trembling and I never went through the experience without weeping and sometimes crying aloud."

Despite her ordeal, Paul declared that the militant tactics of the Pankhursts and the WSPU were a success: "The agitation has brought England out of her lethargy, and women of England are now talking of the time when they will vote, instead of the time when their children would vote, as was the custom a year or two back." Alice Paul believed that she had found the path to victory that continued to elude American women.