Background: The American women’s
suffrage movement has always been identified with its
two founders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
who defined it by their strong, enthusiastic leadership.
When they retired from active participation in the cause,
the loss of that personal connection naturally affected
the movement’s future. The transition was not
an easy one. As the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA), the organization that Stanton and
Anthony had led, headed into the twentieth century,
it lost the dynamism and direction of the nineteenth-century
association. Successors had difficulty measuring up
to Stanton and Anthony, and the organization was unable
to develop a focused plan to guide its difficult campaign.
Alice Paul joined the fray in 1910. Did she pick up
where Stanton and Anthony left off? The answer to that
question is not obvious: Almost anyone familiar with
the suffrage movement has a picture of the kind of leadership
Stanton and Anthony exercised, but most people know
far less about Alice Paul, whose contributions are not
prominently featured in the movement’s history.
Investigation into Paul’s life and contributions
reveals that she had a very different approach to the
twentieth-century battle for the vote, that she was
a radical by the standards of the NAWSA leaders who
succeeded Stanton and Anthony, and that she devoted
her life first to winning the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment and later to the effort to secure the enactment
of the Equal Rights Amendment. For these reasons, any
history of the women’s suffrage movement that
fails to take account of Alice Paul and her organization,
the NWP, is incomplete.
Using the classroom as an historical laboratory, students
can use primary and secondary sources to research the
history of Alice Paul, her associates, and the NWP.
The students can be historians; they can discover the
history of Alice Paul and her fight for women’s
suffrage.
Objectives:
1. Students will be able to create a model to be used
to evaluate the validity of historical evidence.
2. Students will examine primary documents and factual
references to analyze the history of the suffrage movement
through the life and work of Alice Paul.
3. Students will be able to identify the strategies
of both the National American Woman Suffrage Association
and the National Woman’s Party.
4. Students will be engaged in historical research and
critical analysis. They will be able to consider the
historical context of the suffrage movement.
5. Students will be able to examine how the U.S. entry
into World War I affected the campaign for women’s
suffrage.
| 
