Biography
Alice Paul was the founder of the National Woman's Party and chief strategist of the militant U.S. suffrage movement. A Hicksite Quaker from Mount Laurel, New Jersey; PhD in economics (Penn 1912); apprenticed in militant tactics with Emmeline Pankhurst's WSPU in Britain. Beginning January 10, 1917, organized the "Silent Sentinels" picketing. After Oct 20, 1917 arrest, sentenced to seven months and led hunger strikes at the District Jail; authorities transferred her to a psychiatric ward and force-fed her raw eggs through a feeding tube three times daily. Authored the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. Alice Paul was a very prominent suffragette. She was arrested many times for protesting among other things, and she (along with other early suffragettes) frequently went on hunger strike to protest poor prison conditions. In the late 1910s, when Alice Paul went on hunger strike during her seven-month sentence, she was moved to the prison's psychiatric ward and force-fed raw eggs through a tube shoved into her mouth.
Stevens distinguishes a seven-month imposed picketing sentence from five weeks actually served before release in connection with Paul’s hunger strike, and lists additional August 1918 and January 1919 sentences. The printed October 1919 year conflicts with her established October 1917 episode; it is not used to alter dates or her existing individual counter.
Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, Appendix 4, PDF pages 13.
Stevens records a ten-day sentence for the August 1918 Lafayette Square meeting and a separate five-day sentence for lighting a watchfire in January 1919. These are distinct from Paul’s existing seven-month nominal sentence and 1917 imprisonment. The appendix supplies no individual physical arrest, admission or discharge day for either later episode. Its October 1919 label for the seven-month episode conflicts with the documented 1917 chronology and is not used to create another case.
Irwin names Alice Paul, Elsie Hill and Doris Stevens among six women arrested for disorderly conduct during the March 4, 1919 Metropolitan Opera House protest in New York. They spent about half an hour at the station before release. Returning to the protest and being assaulted afterward is not reported as a second arrest or another prison stay. Irwin, The Story of the Woman’s Party, pp.401–416.
