Paul, Alice (1885-1977)

US women's suffrage leader, social reformer, and lawyer. She was the author of the first Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution (1923).

Paul was born in Moorestown, New Jersey. She graduated from Swarthmore, a Quaker college, in 1905 and went on to gain a doctorate in social work and a law degree. She worked with suffragists in England 1906-09, being jailed on three occasions for suffragist actions, and when she returned to the USA organized protest rallies and marches. In 1912 she chaired the congressional committee of the National American Suffrage Association, but, impatient with its policies, helped found the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage the following year; this became the National Woman's Party in 1917, which she later chaired in 1942. Expanding her efforts to the international arena, she founded the World Party for Equal Rights for Women, known as the World Women's Party, in 1938, and managed to secure an equal rights affirmation in the preamble to the United Nations charter.