Book Review by Jo Freeman, A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot

A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot

Woodrow Wilson, however, gets his own chapter. A good deal of Paul’s activity was focused on him, and not on the Members of Congress who had to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Wilson was, as Walton points out, "a complex man." He preferred the company of women to men, but saw them only as homemakers whose God-given job was to make men comfortable.

Although Wilson personally did not believe in woman suffrage, he tried to keep it out of his 1912 campaign. Nonetheless he was willing to meet with suffragists – both NAWSA and Paul’s – many times. In 1914, after seven meetings with suffragists in almost two years, he announced that he would vote "yes" in the New Jersey referendum on suffrage (it lost). This was a major shift in his personal views, but did not mean he was for a federal amendment.

Paul was already racheting up the pressure by sending her women to campaign against all Democrats – even those who supported suffrage – in the Western states where women could vote. She borrowed from the British suffragists the idea that it was necessary to hold the party in power responsible for all policy positions, and to punish all candidates who were members of that party regardless of their personal views or votes on suffrage.

The 1914 campaign was a trial run for that of 1916, when a new organization – the National Woman’s Party – was formed to inflict on the Democrats the wrath of the women. This campaign, which was much publicized at the time, gets surprisingly little attention in this book.

The author devotes considerable pages to the "Silent Sentinels" outside the White House. Under Alice Paul’s command they took up their places in January of 1917 and stayed for over a year. Initially they were ignored by the White House, though certainly not by the press which showered them with disdain and ridicule.

Their banners often contained Wilson’s own stirring words about democracy, especially after he asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2. But in June, they told a visiting Russian delegation that America is Not a Democracy ... Tell Our Government That It Must Liberate the People Before It Can Before It Can Claim Free Russia As An Ally. Russia had just recently overthrown the Czar and was in the midst of a revolution.

This banner enraged not just the President but the American people, some of whom physically attacked the sentinels and ripped up their banners. Official tolerance of the pickets ended and arrests began. Over the next two years over 500 women were arrested and 168 served time in jail.

Some of that time was served in the Occoquan Workhouse, whose superintendent took great pleasure in giving the women a hard time. When they refused to eat the worm-filled food, he had them force fed. The stories they told the press about this experience made them martyrs.

A year after the silent sentinels raised their banners and two months after New York joined the growing number of states to enfranchise women, Wilson asked Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment granting women suffrage as a war measure. It still took another eighteen months and a new Congress before the requisite two-thirds of both houses voted to do so.

Even then victory was not certain. In fact the 36th State barely ratified it in time for most, but not all, women to vote in the 1920 general election. It was an exciting time. Walton tells this story in a compelling style that lets you live the experience.

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A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot

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