The National Woman's Party
The suffrage campaign evolved most dramatically in 1913 when Alice
Paul, a young American woman who had been active in the British suffragette
campaign, created a committee within NAWSA. Paul’s Congressional Union (CU) was
a small group of women within NAWSA who were dedicated to developing a national suffrage amendment. Paul
believed that NAWSA was an old organization, whose state-by-state approach to
suffrage cost women time and money. Alice Paul, instead, opted for a much more
aggressive campaign modeled after the militant strategies of the English
suffragettes.
Paul had worked in England to help campaign alongside women
like Emmeline Pankhurst. Famously, English suffragettes employed a much more
physically threatening campaign than their American counterparts. The British
suffragettes chained themselves to buildings, blew up mailboxes, were
imprisoned, and force-fed.[1] The
militant strategies of British suffragettes were very unlike the slow, quiet,
cautious methods of NAWSA. One thing that Paul took away from the British
movement was a sincere interest in the way that suffragettes navigated the
media.[2]
Woman’s Party. Many leaders of the organization admired the British movement
and tried to emulate the spectacle that made the British suffragettes newspaper
sensations. The members of the NWP copied the spectacle of woman’s suffrage,
but they maintained a nonviolent campaign. They employed a number of tactics
like parades, pageants, open air talks, tableaus – a paused scene from history
or mythology with immobile actors – automobile tours, and picketing. The
organization hoped that constant agitation would keep them in the public
consciousness. If the NWP could keep attention turned on woman suffrage, then
the cause would be able to petition and lobby congressmen and even President
Wilson to secure the vote for women.
[1]
Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette: The
History of the Miltant Woman’s Suffrage Movement (Boston: The Woman’s
Journal, 1911), 431.
[2]
For an examination of British suffragettes in media see Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the
Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
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