Alice Paul and the Fight for Women's Rights
From the Vote to the Equal Rights Amendment
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
Perfect for Women's History Month, here is the story of the extraordinary Alice Paul, a leader in the long struggle for votes for women.
Alice Paul made a significant impact on both the woman's suffrage movement—the long struggle for votes for women—to the "second wave," when women demanded full equality with men. After women won the vote in 1920, Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would make all the laws that discriminated against women unconstitutional. Passage of the ERA became the rallying cry of a new movement of young women in the 1960s and '70s. Paul saw another chance to advance women's rights when the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 began moving through Congress. She set in motion the "sex amendment," which remains a crucial legal tool for helping women fight discrimination in the workplace. A true "girl power" book for today's young women, the title includes archival images, an author's note, a bibliography, and source notes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born in 1885, 65 years after Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul may be a lesser-known warrior for women's suffrage but, as Kops unequivocally reveals in this thorough biography, she was no less passionate or determined. After recapping Paul's Quaker childhood in New Jersey and her college years at Swarthmore, Kops (The Great Molasses Flood: Boston, 1919) steps up the pace as she follows Paul to London. There the gutsy Paul studied social activism, joined the ranks of protesting suffragettes, and was jailed for the first of many times. Her zeal for women's voting rights ignited after she settled in Washington, D.C., where the suffrage campaign "was Alice Paul's life" and "she fired on all four cylinders." The author convincingly recreates charged episodes as Paul and her colleagues picketed Woodrow Wilson's White House and endured unlawful arrests, sentences in jails and workhouses, and hunger strikes all building to the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Archival photos and quotes culled from Paul's correspondence, her contemporaries' observations, and the press further illuminate the life of this indefatigable crusader. Ages 11 up.
