Alice Paul and the Women of Quaker Activism
In this episode, we talk with Alison Titman, the executive director of the Alice Paul Institute. We discuss activism among Quaker women and the life and legacy of Alice Paul, a significant figure in the women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. Join us as we uncover untold stories in Quaker women’s history!
The mission of the Alice Paul Institute is to honor the legacy of Alice Paul’s work for gender equality through education and leadership development. The Institute regularly offers events and programs that address gender equality, civic engagement, intersectionality, other topics that help to grow the next generations of crusaders for equality. It also offers the public the opportunity to visit Alice Paul's childhood home, Paulsdale, and learn more about Paul's upbringing in a Quaker family and her growth as an activist.
Allison Titman joined the Alice Paul Institute as Executive Director in January 2020. Previously, she held the same role at the American Helicopter Museum and Education Center in West Chester, PA. She also spent five years as an Accreditation Program Officer at the American Alliance of Museums, where she worked with museums all over the country to improve their operations and achieve accreditation. She has held leadership, curatorial, and exhibit management roles at several historic house museums in the Washington, D.C. region, as well as the Women’s Memorial at Arlington Cemetery. Allison holds an MBA, an MA in Museum Studies from the George Washington University, and a BA in Women’s Studies from Barnard College. She is very active in the museum community in the mid-Atlantic region; currently she is a Board Member and Strategic Planning Committee Chair for PA Museums, and her past roles include President and Conference Committee Chair of the Small Museum Association and President of the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum. Allison lives in South Philadelphia with her family and two gray cats.
Thank you for listening, and join us as we Meet Quaker History.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION
[Denis 0:00]: Hello everyone, and welcome to our second installment of the “Arch Street Meeting House: Untold Stories” podcast. You guys already know who I am; my name is Denis Long, I'm a senior at Rowan University, I'm a history major, but I would like to give an introduction to Allison Titman, the Executive Director of the Alice Paul Institute and today we are going to be discussing women Quaker activists, specifically, Alice Paul in movements such as the Women's Suffrage and Women's Rights Movements. Allison, feel free to introduce yourself.
[Allison 0:35]: Thanks Denis, I'm really glad to be here! As Denis noted, my name is Allison Titman, I've been the Executive Director of the Alice Paul Institute since January and I have a background in museums, as well as in women's history. So, I know a lot about Alice Paul, about the Suffrage Movement through that context, but I definitely still have more to learn after just two and a half months on the job.
[Denis 0:58]: I'm happy to have you here this way we can have a nice little like back and forth, talking about my research with Quakers and your research with Women's Rights Activists, so I just kind of wanted to start this off a little bit of a prelude when it comes to Quakers and Women's because Quakers and women have an interesting relationship in how women and men sort of viewed themselves in a Quaker society, early Quaker women had forms of authority in the organization of the church in their community and did not exactly struggle with men for power but also did not submit to them. They held some equal roles of authority, but neither was really separate from one or another. Some Quaker women are also very unafraid to speak out against any sort of patriarchal oppression that they experienced. I have a very interesting quote that I have found in my research from a Quaker Woman’s Sermon. It was a very interesting thing to read because it was very much so something that I can see someone in the modern day saying, it says “My dear friends, there are three things I very much wonder at. The first is, that children should be so foolish as to throw up stones, brickbats, and clubs into fruit trees, to knock down fruit; if they would only let it alone, it would fall itself. The second is, that men should go to war and kill one another, if they would only let one another alone they would die themselves. And the third and last thing which I wonder at is, that young men should be so unwise as to go after young women; for if they would stay at home young women would come after them." The condition of the most unfortunate is almost the most despised, is it not enough that they are miserable, but to enhance their affliction, they must be persecuted and scorned. In truth, man is a very savage animal.” And so, very, of course, harsh language in some aspect, you know, in the cinematics(?) of 19th century America but also it has a little bit of truth to it in some ways, there's a lot of violence that exults (?) from patriarchal systems that we experienced throughout all American History and I was curious if you feel like if you, Allison feel like sentiments like this definitely contribute to at least Quaker women wanting to contribute to these Women’s Rights Movements.
[Allison 3:16]: Well, I think it says a lot about from the very beginning of the Women's Suffrage Movement in America that Quaker women were so heavily involved. You spoke a bit already about gender equality within Quakerism and how many women were viewed as equal even if it's still potentially felt like they held different roles. One topic that I look forward to reading more about is marriage within the Quaker community. What helped many women out from being more involved in activism and sometimes in public life as a whole, was the way that marriage functioned, the way that women were expected to be subservient to their husband, the way women didn't even exist under the law, as soon as they married, they held none of the rights of citizenship. But instead, the husband held those rights on their behalf. I think it says a lot that married Quaker women were very active and very vocal about women's suffrage, and I'm interested to learn more about how gender equality applied in Quaker marriage to see how that allows them to continue to be public figures.
[Denis 4:19]: Absolutely. There's a lot of… I'm currently doing my senior year seminar paper on various Quaker social justice movements and I have found a lot of material about specifically famous Quaker activists such as, not just only Alice Paul that we are talking about today, but also Lucretia Mott, Amy Kirby-Post. Each of them seemed to be married, at least both Mott and Post, I don’t exactly remember if Paul was married. I don’t know why that is blanking from my head right now, but either way, it's still interesting to see that even in this married state and like you said they're not exactly legal citizens, I forget how you exactly worded it, but it's still Interesting to see them continue on with this drive to strive for gender equality. Even in such a harsh legal state. And another thing is that it is interesting to think that this wasn't relatively that long ago. This is still less than 200 years ago which is quite surprising when you really think about it, there is a lot of things in American history that I feel like that people don’t realize was not that long ago especially with things with the Civil Rights Movement too. So, it is really interesting to see how quickly this type of thing has evolved from ideologies, such as, those of Quaker women and when it comes to ideologies influencing people, I feel like this would actually be a pretty good time why not just jump into Alice Paul, already, just to kind of give a little bit of brief background on Alice Paul. She was born on January 11, 1885 in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, which is where the Alice Paul Institute is located, and some from my research it said that she was raised in a Hicksite Quaker family. So that kind of made her accustomed to the more activist side of Quakerism being raised by activists Hicksites and later influenced her “commitment to nonviolence.” Do you have anything that you would like to say on Alice Paul's upbringing?
[Allison 6:11]: I would definitely like to give credit to Alice Paul's mother, Tacie. It was actually Tacie who introduced Alice to the concept of the fight for women's suffrage. She took Alice to the meetings that were happening around their home and in their community at a fairly young age, so it was definitely an ideology that Paul absorbed early, and her mother was a very observant Hicksite. She adheres to the standards of dress within that community, so it's interesting to think about what ideologies Alice was absorbing at home. I get the sense that Alice lived a fairly protected life and very close-knit Quaker community. She went off to Swarthmore College, which is a Quaker institution, at the age of 16, after having gone to a Friends school and then a very close part of a Quaker meeting. So, it wasn't until after college, that she really got a broader view of the world and started having to try to reconcile that with the ideologies in which she was raised.
[Denis 7:10]: Absolutely, yeah! I feel like one interesting quote from a secondary source I was reading while researching, and it basically stated while her Hicksite upbringing influencing principles of politics it was mainly “her own ambition and newfound awareness of gender equality, that brought her to realize that she was personally invested in suffrage,” so do you…this is kind of like a nature versus nurture situation, if you understand what I'm trying to get at here, not exactly, but it still has, it's still reminiscent of it because you know while she was nurtured into this sort of more activist leaning upbringing, there was still so much of the world that she would be able to become conscious to when it came to just how much inequality women were undergoing, especially having gone to a higher education. She would have likely had a, you know, like you said, being able to look more out into the world and see exactly what was going on. So, do you feel like, what do you feel like was kind of like this true driving force in a way, like is there something that you kind of lean more towards to?
[Allison 8:18]: Well, I think it would have to be both with Alice, as you learn more about her adult life, you realize that she devoted its entirety to her crusade for gender equality, from when she graduated from college, started doing settlement housework and then went to England to continue her education, and got involved in the Suffrage Movement there. She became very single minded about the fight for gender equality, and as we've noted it was something she absorbed at home, but I think it takes a special person to be that single minded about a cause and to really never deviate from it. Most people know that Alice Paul was heavily involved in the movement to get women to vote; what they don't know is what happened after 1920. When the 19th amendment passed so women were able to vote, Alice didn't abandon the Movement and move on to something else she went on to write the Equal Rights Amendment, found the World Woman's Party, and spend the next almost 60 years continuing to push for gender equality for women. She really kept on with that crusade and didn't have much of a life outside of that. Her friends were people she met through the Movement; she spent most of her adult life living in the headquarters of the National Woman's Party, so she literally lived in her office. Life was really work for her.
[Denis 9:42]: And kind of going back to what we said earlier about how this stuff isn't really that long ago; I just looked up to double check the date, she only passed away in 1977. You know, granted, she was rather old having been born in 1885, but it wasn't really that long ago when she passed away. My parents were still alive when she was alive, which is very interesting to think about and also looking into this to, it seemed that she never married. So, it also kind of goes beyond the standard that previous women activists, specifically Quaker women activists had aligned themselves to considering that both Lucretia Mott and Amy Post were married as well. When you talk about the Women's Right Party there was an interesting quote that I found in a primary source that I found. In a legal memo from the Women's Rights Party, one of them said that Alice Paul had “built up a nationwide organization of women by the pledge to regard.” Another quote “women's suffrage as the foremost political issues of the day supporting it, irrespective of the interest of any political party.” So, like you said she's very very committed to this and I'm not surprised that she was basically sleeping in her office. I feel like that it shows a level of commitment that is really unmatched by, it only matched by a few other figures in American history. In the last installment of this we actually talked about Benjamin Lay who was another Quaker, a staunch abolitionist who very similarly to Alice Paul was incredibly dedicated to the cause that he fought for going to very, very great extents to try to get his anti-slavery point across. So, I feel like, both not only just Quaker upbringing, but also just standard commitment to what they truly believe in and having witnessed the inequalities that they're trying to combat really does have a strong, strong impact on the drive of a person for their cause. Let's actually go real quick to Alice Paul in England. This is a really interesting subject. I was fascinated by this when I was reading about this. Do you remember where she went off to school in England, I don't think I wrote it down.
[Allison 11:52]: There was a community for Quakers pursuing education in England, its name escapes me right now, but again you can see how she followed this trajectory of Quaker education from a Friends School to Swarthmore and then over to England, and then that's really where she started to think more about what she wanted to be involved in, not to separate from Quakerism but to start to explore outside of it.
[Denis 12:19]: Definitely went outside of it considering that she had actually been in prison for participating in these more… Would you consider like the England Suffrage Movements, a little bit more radical in their practices compared to the American ones?
[Allison 12:36]: The English Suffragettes were vocal about their willingness to utilize more militant tactics; they felt like that's what was making them more successful in gaining attention. And that was everything from chaining themselves to gates, to breaking windows to interrupting speeches by important political figures, and this was really spearheaded by the women in the Pankhurst family Christabel and Emmeline being potentially the most famous members, and the ones who are really identified with those tactics. What's interesting is when Alice came back to America having been schooled in those tactics, she had to be very careful about separating what the American Movement was going to do under her leadership, because the Americans had read about the British Suffragettes and found them really threatening. So, Alice could see that in order for women to get suffrage in America, she was going to have to disavow some of those tactics, and to create a new image for the American Suffragettes. And there's a lot written about how they did this both in sort of admiring this strategy of creating the image of a suffragette that was palatable to an American audience, but also a growing criticism because the image they created was young, white, attractive, middle to upper class, it was one defining image. It didn't necessarily fit the whole community of American women, which is a legacy that the movement for gender equality continues to struggle with today.
[Denis 14:08]: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I found in my research I found a short document of multiple newspaper clippings from when Alice Paul had returned from England to America. And it's interesting to see each of these different accounts. One of them even says she had been tube fed while in an English prison, which is interesting to see, considering, like I said this wasn't long ago, yet they're still using such strange practices in these situations. But it also goes to show just the extents of what a patriarchal society does against women's rights activists. It’s rather barbaric in a way. I don't like to use a word like that but it's kind of just the first one coming to my mind. But nonetheless, though it's still really inspiring to see nonetheless that Alice Paul still continued to commit herself to this cause, albeit, you know, having kind of, like you said, disavowing the practices that she saw and admired law in England, but she was still lauded by other women's rights activists once she returned, you know, having kind of being like a, like a civil disobedience martyr in a way. A little bit of a different context, do you feel like Alice Paul could be a strong case for the argument that great individuals can either make or break a social justice movement like the Women's Rights Movement?
[Allison 15:36]: I think that we as historians like to seize upon individuals as figures as representatives of a movement. I think that at the time the movement is happening, it's clear that there's a much sort of broader group of people involved, but over time it gets boiled down and we focus on individual people, but I think that's useful. And I think it happens at the time too, especially in things like the media. As you noted, Alice was written about often in the media, and she positioned other suffragists to be written about as well, because she realized the power of media coverage of making people into larger-than-life images, and it's interesting to look at the way that they were personified in that kind of coverage. As you noted, Alice was first imprisoned and forced fed, while she was in England, and received media coverage for it back home, but those articles still refer to her as things like a shy slip of a girl. I cannot imagine calling an adult woman who was tied down and forced fed, a shy slip of a girl, but that was how the media was covering the suffragists. Again, to make them more palatable or to make the story one that audiences wanted to read about. So, I think it helped that there were these sorts of pivotal moments and pivotal practices that the media could seize upon to turn Alice into a story as well as a person.
[Denis 17:06]: Absolutely, yeah, that like, what's the right word for it? The word is slipping from my mind, but just manipulating the type of story into where you turn these strong women into such frail objects in a media light is really just repulsive and still honestly something that I've from my personal experience I've seen continued to this day. I often see, you know especially media standards when it comes to women in their age, have become so ridiculously high that even the woman who hits her 30s is considered an old lady in some media respects and it really just goes to show seeing something like this that people calling Alice Paul a shy slip of a girl that these types of practices still continue onward and I was Paul's fight still needs to continue to this day, even without her here. When we come back to the concept of Quaker women and how they feel in an almost equal to men, do you feel like even later on in Alice Paul's life that she's still kind of embody this type of belief?
[Allison 18:16]: Alice constructed her life around the fight for gender equality and I think it can be traced back to her origins in a Quaker family with a mother who was taking her to suffrage meetings as well as, as we said clearly just something inside of her, a call out to her to be a crusader for justice. I will say that at that Alice Paul Institute, we make sure to acknowledge Alice’s failings, as well as her successes. She was a great crusader for gender equality but along the way, did not stand up for things like racial equality that we view as so important today. In order to accomplish her single-minded mission of getting women to vote and then, furthering their legal rights, she was willing to make compromises, like making African American Women's presence in the Suffrage Movement less visible. Again, in order to make it more palatable to this mainstream audience it was so deeply invested in white supremacy. So, Alice Paul's legacy is key; she was a crusader for gender equality, but we don't want to make it seem like she was perfect or that she was an absolute hero. We are fine with her being a complicated figure, and we like to explore that and to talk about how the Movement for gender equality that's happening today can do better and has come a long way, even since Alice’s time as an activist.
[Denis 19:43]: Definitely! It's always very interesting to see the complicated relationships and intersectionality when it comes to previous Race Movements like you said, I believe, you said it earlier on, but a lot of the Women's Rights Movement, at least during this time kind of had a more upper middle class younger white woman focus. And I remember learning in one of my American history courses that early on in my college career that a lot of that late 19th century progressive movement was kind of spearheaded by upper middle class white women and tried to create that singular middle-class kind of ideal that even nowadays many, at least white middle class activists also kind of strive for. So, it kind of has not died in a way which is very interesting to see and I, and I'm also happy to see that the Alice Paul Institute does recognize her failings. This way, people can, you know, people are not… this false dichotomy is not created for the American public and it shows, it goes to show that this type of critical thinking is really essential to not just learning about history but learning about society as a whole and being able to understand your fellow people. Going back to the Alice Paul Institute as a whole, feel free to tell me a little bit more about it if you would like to add a little more, I would love to hear about it. I'm sure that you would love to have some free promotion as well.
[Allison 21:04]: Thank you! The Alice Paul Institute was founded to celebrate Alice Paul's 100th birthday, which happened in 1985. Since then, we have been honoring Alice's legacy by continuing to crusade for gender equality through measures such as the Equal Rights Amendment, and to provide leadership training and empowerment to women. We want to create the next generations of Alice Paul’s so many of our programs focus on leadership training for girls and young women. Our signature program, it's called the “Girls Leadership Council,” it's aimed at a high school audience, and the girls gather once a month during the school year to talk about issues affecting women and girls today, and to create projects that are going to allow them to get their own experience, organizing and executing something, as well as to educate younger girls about the things that they're learning. We own Alice Paul's childhood home, Paulsdale so, if you want to see the environment she grew up in and we can provide that experience. Right now, we have an outdoor audio tour. But we're looking forward to reopening the interior to public visitation later this year.
[Denis 22:16]: That's great, that's awesome! I perused your website a few times while I was doing this research as well and it really seems like a great place and I'm sure that both the Alice Paul Institute and the Arch Street Meeting House I feel like are two very, very important places to go to in this area when it comes to learning about social justice history as you know you have so much history rooted in not only just the Quakers, but also in Alice Paul herself, really truly wonderful thing. As a question to further discuss and to end this out on, when it comes to considering what we have talked about Alice Paul, her upbringing, her social experiences, what do you think is probably the most important aspect to really delve into, not only just from an historian perspective but also from a public perspective and to consider in someone's daily life.
[Allison 23:08]: For me it's the commitment to social change. I think looking at Quaker practices, the most interesting part to me is how this fundamental belief in equality becomes something that people put into action. I think that's something that Alice Paul did, and I think it's something that we should all examine within the context of our own lives. There's so much happening around social justice, how are we demonstrating a commitment to change, and a commitment to equality in our world today.
[Denis 23: 37]: Yeah, no I completely agree. Like I mentioned earlier, the last installment that we had also had another figure at the spearhead of it, so committed to social change, Benjamin Lay and I'm glad that we got another person similar to him who was so fervent about the cause that they were committed to and had gone through so many unique experiences in order to basically get to where they were in in their commitment. So, it's nice to see these numerous ties in history, and to be able to connect this all into a grander message of, you know, kind of devoting your heart to a cause that you find yourself committed to, whether it be a singular cause or multiple causes. I know you have single issue activists or many issue activists as well. But overall, I feel this was a really wonderful discussion and I'm very happy to have had talked to you about this. Alice Paul is really a wonderful figure in American history to study when it comes to, like you said commitment to a cause, and even the intricacies of a strong public figure that may have had some complex aspects to them like we talked about, but overall, thank you so much for this discussion and I really enjoyed it. To wrap up here I would like to thank our guest Allison Titman for joining me today, as well as all of our listeners for tuning in. For more information about today's topics and resources, please visit historicASMh.org/podcast. Arch Street Meeting House is dedicated to preserving and maintaining the historic Meeting House and Burial Grounds and expanding public understanding of the impact and continued relevance of Quakers. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to continue to support Arch Street Meeting House, please consider making a financial gift at historicASMH.org/donate.
Join us next time as we explore untold stories in Quaker history. See you then!
WORKS CITED
“A Quaker Woman’s Sermon.” Gleason’s Monthly Companion 1, no. 3 (March 1872): 153. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.rowan.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=h9m&AN=64 288656&site=ehost-live.
ADAMS, KATHERINE H., and MICHAEL L. KEENE. "Alice Paul’s Formation as Activist." In Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 1-20. University of Illinois Press, 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcpzj.5.
ADAMS, KATHERINE H., and MICHAEL L. KEENE. "The Commitment to Nonviolence." In Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 21-41. University of Illinois Press, 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcpzj.6.
ADAMS, KATHERINE H., and MICHAEL L. KEENE. "Hunger Strikes and Jail." In Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 191-214. University of Illinois Press, 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcpzj.12.
National Woman's Party press releases on organization and suffrage movement activities, including ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Jul 1, 1920 - Oct 31, 1920. National Woman's Party Publications: Press Releases, July-October 1920. Library of Congress and Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C. https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=002621-092-0565&accountid=13605
Newspaper clippings on Alice Paul return from England following her imprisonment for militant suffrage activities, January 1, 1910 to December 31, 1910. National Woman's Party Papers, Part I: 1913-1974, Series 3: Printed Materials, 1850-1972. Library of Congress and Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C. https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=002615-170-0018&accountid=13605
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Spencer, Carole D. "Evangelism, Feminism and Social Reform: The Quaker Woman Minister and the Holiness Revival." Quaker History 80, no. 1 (1991): 24-48.
Vetter, Lisa Pace. The Political Thought of America's Founding Feminists. New York: New York University Press, 2017.
Zahniser, J. D., and Fry, Amelia R.. Alice Paul : Claiming Power : Claiming Power. New York: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2014.