West European Studies

The Beginnings of Suffrage Movement
In the early 1900s, the womans movement had come to a standstill. Women activists had been campaigning for womens rights for over half a century, and many people in the United States already agreed that women deserved the right to vote. The activities of the National Womans Party (NWP) and the narrowed focus on suffrage came at the end of the early womens movement when many activists and supporters were trying to decide how they could re-energize the effort to reach their goalthe ballot for women.

The NWP alone did not gain suffrage for women. The NWPs activities came at the end of a mature movement for womens rights. The national and regional womans rights conventions that began in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, formed the organizing principles and networks of the early womens movement. Out of the 1848 convention emerged the Declaration of Sentiments, the early movements manifesto. Along with listing the grievances that existed between women and society and acting as an ideological statement of the goals of the early womens movement, the resolutions that accompanied it included a demand for woman suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stantons speech to the Seneca Falls convention spoke clearly to those who objected to womens demand for the vote. She vehemently argued that the vote for women was a natural right of women citizens.

Although the conventions held for the next twelve years served to solidify support for womans rights, just as the movement began to gain momentum, it experienced internal conflict and the Civil War began. Womans rights activities ceased during the war. Linda Brigance writes When the war started in 1861, the most visible womens rights activity, the conventions, were discontinued.  After the war ended, women activists resumed their battle for womans rights and especially the right to vote. Women involved in the earlier womens movement and the war effort hoped that their contributions during the war might be rewarded with suffrage.

The suffragists experienced more internal conflict because of the Fourteenth Amendment, which not only did not give women the vote but also inserted the word male into the Constitution for the first time. Some took a principled stand for universal suffrage for women and African Americans, but others felt strongly that freed male slaves needed the political power that only the ballot could bring. The rift between factions of the suffragists grew, and in 1869, two separate organizations were created, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Henry Ward Beecher and Lucy Stone. The split lasted until 1890 when the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) emerged from the merger of the two organizations.

Suffragists realized that ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment meant that the vote would require constitutional change, and, therefore, they began the long, arduous process of pursuing a federal woman suffrage amendment. What became the Nineteenth Amendment was introduced first in December of 1868, followed in March of 1869 by a Joint Resolution to both Houses, but to no avail. Realizing the difficulty of achieving a federal amendment for woman suffrage, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the election of 1872. Following the unsuccessful attempts to introduce suffrage as a federal amendment, Anthonys vote, the exhausting defense of her position, woman suffragists worked to influence male voters and to introduce suffrage amendments into state legislatures and state constitutions.

Although the suffragists worked hard to achieve the vote, only a few states had enfranchised women. Accordingly, the period between 1890 and 1915 frequently was referred to as the doldrums. Campbell details their lack of progress By 1912, for example, after sixty-four years of organized effort, only nine Western states with forty-five electoral votes allowed women to vote. Explanations for the lack of progress and motivation range from the deaths of the original movements leaders, to a transition and upheaval in movement leadership, and to anti-suffrage ascendancy.

But, beginning in Washington in 1910, through Arizona in 1912, state referendum campaigns were beginning to be successful. During the lull in the woman suffrage campaign, NAWSA President Carrie Chapman Catt used her organizational finesse, leadership skills, and motivation to build a better organization. NAWSAs existence as a long-standing suffrage organization combined with its new leader and increased organizational strength provided the organization, public recognition, and national leadership needed to move the organization forward.

Carrie Chapman Catt contributed a great deal to NAWSA and the suffrage movement with her leadership from 1900 to 1904 and later from 1915 until 1920. She began her political work on the NAWSA Organizing Committee and proved her organizing skills during the late 1880s in suffrage campaigns in Iowa, Colorado, Idaho, and South Dakota. She resigned from the presidency of NAWSA in 1904 stating that she needed to rest and care for her husband and mother.

After Catts resignation in 1904, the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw became president of NAWSA, a post she would hold until 1915. Carrie Chapman Catt had contributed leadership and organizing to the movement, but Anna Howard Shaws abilities as an orator made her invaluable to suffrage campaigns. Although Shaw successfully articulated suffrage arguments across the country, many doubted her administrative and organizational skills and feared that her connection with the Womans Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) would intertwine temperance and suffrage.

As president of NAWSA, Shaw willingly spoke for woman suffrage everywhere and as often as she could. During Shaws presidency, membership in NAWSA rose from 17,000 to 200,000, but woman suffrage did not prosper as rapidly as NAWSA membership thought it should. During the last years of Shaws presidency, NAWSA members and other suffrage supporters had become impatient with suffrage tactics and lack of progress. Before Shaw resigned, some NAWSA members questioned the state-by-state campaigns for suffrage and called for more militant tactics.

Alice Paul and Foundation of NWP
Born in 1885 into a Hicksite Quaker family in Moorsetown, N.J., Alice Paul attended Quaker schools and then Swarthmore College where she earned a B.A. in social work in 1905. Alice Pauls life as a Quaker influenced her role in the NWP, her philosophical justifications for her positions, and her connections to the womans movement. As Adams and Keane noted, Pauls Quaker faith assisted her in overcoming the obstacles faced by a women speaking in public.

Alice Paul earned a masters degree at University of Pennsylvania in 1907 and began her dissertation almost immediately. Pauls academic background was in sociology, political science and economics. She put her doctorate work on hold to accept a sociology fellowship in Woodbridge, England. This trip changed her life by introducing her to social issues and suffragism.

While in England, Paul observed not only the sentiments but also the militant tactical style of the British suffrage movement and was invited to stay beyond her fellowship to work as a caseworker or social worker. She agreed to stay and became infatuated with the British. suffrage movement. She became an active suffragette and demonstrated, was imprisoned, and marched in parades in favor of suffrage. She made strong political alliances, most importantly with Lucy Burns, with whom she created a dialogue regarding the American womens suffrage movement.

In 1907, Paul encountered Emmeline Pankhurst and the militant suffragettes of the WSPU. While in London, Paul joined the WSPUs activities and was arrested. Paul returned to the United States in 1910 anxious to use tactics similar to those of the Pankhursts in the U.S. struggle for suffrage. Her English experiences had convinced her that U.S. women needed to adopt new strategies in their struggle for equality and suffrage. As Adams and Keene comment When Paul came home, she recognized that her tie to the Pankhursts and her time in jail gave her access to the media and to women that she would not otherwise have had since she had no experience in American organizations.

The single-issue focus Paul assimilated in England shaped her views of the political process and the goals and tactics she chose for the NWP. After Pauls own arrest for picketing in front of the White House, she was examined by the federal hospitals psychiatrist, whose report of her condition clearly reflected Pauls dedication to suffrage. The doctor adjudged her sane but noted that she had a will of iron She would die for her cause but she would never give up.

What became the NWP originated out of NAWSA and evolved into an independent organization. In 1912, the Congressional Committee of the NAWSA was led by Alice Paul. It was charged with enfranchisement work at the federal level, including tracking legislation and lobbying. Early in 1912, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns met to discuss what they might do to pursue goals and tactics different than those of NAWSA. Burns and Paul presented NAWSA with a proposal that met with resistance because of its plan for an anti-Democratic party campaign and other militant actions.

After revision, NAWSA approved a march on Washington on the eve of Woodrow Wilsons inauguration. Paul was allowed to choose the members of her committee and to carry out all of the responsibilities for planning the parade. At that point, NAWSA made it clear that the Congressional Committee (CC) would have to raise their own operating expenses. The CCs first general meeting on January 2, 1913, drew women the CCs founding members had culled from their own contacts and the NAWSA Washington, D.C., membership list. The CC carried out a number of militant actions, but its primary contribution to the NWP would be the development of a focus on the federal amendment as the only means to attain suffrage.

The Congressional Committee (CC) became the Congressional Union (CU), which took the position that a combination of increased federal activity and militant demonstrations, marches, and pickets was necessary to reach the goal of a federal amendment for woman suffrage. NAWSA disagreed with the CUs militant tactics, its exclusive focus on a federal amendment, and the policy of holding the party in power responsible for the failure to pass the amendment. Although the CU started in 1913 as a division of NAWSA, the differences in membership, tactics, and philosophies soon drove the two groups apart.

These disagreements led the CU to sever any connection to its parent organization in 1914. The CU planned and executed many militant demonstrations, pickets, and deputations, which allowed Pauls ideas concerning strategies and a focus on a federal amendment to gain more adherents and more attention. In November of 1913, the CU began its own journal, the Suffragist, a move that symbolized a definite break from NAWSA.

In 1916, during a National Convention in Chicago, the CU merged with western womens movement organizations to become the National Womans Party and continued, with increased fervor, its fight for a federal woman suffrage amendment. Paul saw the creation of the NWP as a necessary tool to serve as the balance of power in the national election which promised to be closely contended. Creation of the NWP gave Paul and her followers increased strength and numbers due to the networks, membership, and activities of the groups that formed the new, National Organization. The NWP was founded with one aim, the need for a federal amendment for woman suffrage, and its new standing as a truly national organization made achievement of their goal increasingly feasible.

The NWPs militant tactics and successful use of the press pushed suffrage to the top of the agenda for the Congress, and the president, and it mobilized suffragists. Simply stated, the NWPs goal was to secure an amendment to the Constitution of the United States enfranchising the women of the whole country. In other words, the rhetorical situation called for actions that could influence the government, gain significant press attention, keep moderate supporters happy, and create and maintain the morale of NWP members.

NWP and Its Innovative Tactics
The NWP was the first organization to gain successful coverage in the press, to mobilize women and Congress to act, and to make use of both non-traditional and traditional strategies. Alice Paul and her well-organized band of determined and energetic women created an effective and highly respected press bureau that maintained almost constant press coverage of the NWPs activities and ideas. Other organizations had been radical andor militant in action and print, but no other womans rights group had seen the benefit of combining militant actions with sustained efforts to gain press coverage.

The NWPs strategies also went well beyond what other womens and suffrage organizations had done. Women had been speaking out in favor of suffrage, lobbying, and running state-by-state ratification campaigns since the late 1850s. All of the women campaigning for suffrage had violated the norms prescribed for women because of their appearances in public and interest in a political topic, but none had pushed the norms as far as the NWP did. Through their use of increasingly militant tactics, NWP members violated norms in ways that U.S. women had not previously attempted.

The visual and nonverbal tactics employed by the NWP challenged and adapted to norms for women while providing the woman suffrage movement with a much needed rhetoric of agitation and mobilization. Never before had women engaged in such strikingly political and militant actions. The marches, parades, pickets, watchfires, and other visualnonverbal tactics allowed NWP members to violate norms for women while giving voice to their concerns. The NWPs innovative visual and nonverbal tactics were so distinctive and attention-getting that audiences could not avoid them, yet they were so carefully feminized that they did not alienate supporters or audiences.

Realizing that not all women in the NWPs audience would approve of their more militant tactics, the NWP published the Suffragist. The Suffragist made the militant tactics of the NWP more palatable to women while educating them to be more effective advocates. A publication dedicated to the enfranchisement of women, the Suffragist was not without historical precedent. The Una, The Lily, The Revolution, the Womans Journal and the Womans Tribune, among others, preceded it, but all differed from it in content and purpose. Other womens journals were similar in reporting on organization activities, but differed due to their persuasive goals, their inclusion of literary pieces, their support of other social and political reforms, and their attention to aspects of domestic life.
The impact of the NWPs mobilizational techniques was heightened by the political situation of the time. Before and during 1910s, the United States experienced great turmoil. The increase in immigration, labor unrest, the onset of World War I (WWI), the paranoia of the Wilson administration, which led to the suppression and limitation of civil liberties, the birth of propaganda, and womens enfranchisement in the western states all affected the NWP and its actions.

Out of the stagnant period in the womans movement and the turbulence in society and politics, the NWP forged a new direction for the womens movement. The NWPs militancy and agitation encouraged movement members and sympathizers to take action. In her essay on Alice Paul, Vivian Gornick clearly stated the importance of the NWPs actions Carrie Chapman Catt could not see that Alice Pauls activism revitalized NAWSA and brought to an entire nation the urgency of womans suffrage as probably no other kind of action could have.

As the Congressional Union (CU) left the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to pursue goals that differed from those of the larger organization, the CU leaders saw the need for an internal publication. In order to mobilize women activists, the NWP needed a central place to issue information, to educate, to empower, and to train women to use the tools necessary for them to confront and overcome the numerous obstacles they faced. Its internal organ, the Suffragist, met those goals.

The Suffragist ran from November 15, 1913, to 1920. Begun as a weekly newspaper, it became a biweekly in 1919 and a monthly in 1920.3 It measured approximately eleven by fourteen inches, averaged eight to twelve pages, and balanced print with photographs or drawings. By December of 1913, the magazine claimed at least 1,200 paid subscribers the June 26, 1916, issue reported an average subscription rate of 3,320. The increasing circulation of the Suffragist allowed the NWP to counteract the unfavorable publicity given its militant tactics by some of the suffrage and general press.

Paul rejected a propaganda newspaper because she felt it hat mass persuasion in support of woman suffrage was no longer needed. Rather, suffrage sympathizers and supporters needed to be activatednot just to believe. As explained in the Salutatory

There is hardly a town, village, or wayside hamlet in the United States that has not been reached by the suffragists hardly a man or a woman in the United States who has not listened to suffrage speeches or read suffrage literature. There is not one single literate person, now in doubt, who can not easily and cheaply inform himself fully as to the merits of woman suffrage. It is a subject infinitely more familiar to voters than the tariff, the currency, or conservation. Therefore, we declare that woman suffrage has passed beyond propaganda and has reached its political stage.

Accordingly, the Suffragist would not attempt to persuade readers to support womans right to vote it assumed that readers already believed in woman suffrage all that remained in dispute were the means to achieve that goal. The Suffragist would be political in its focus on persuading readers of the necessity of a federal amendment and of participatory, militant action in order to achieve that goal.

The Suffragist differed from other woman suffrage publications because it abandoned the usual forms of persuasion in favor of a rhetoric of visualization and mobilization.7 While similar journals attempted to persuade readers to support woman suffrage and offered them arguments to defend their positions, the Suffragist assumed that such persuasion had been successful and aimed its efforts to complement the NWPs specialized focusto work for a federal amendment. Editor Rheta Childe Dorr accurately stated its purposes.

The Suffragist is the most important part of our work. We could not work effectively for the federal amendment unless our members were kept, by the paper, in close touch with the position of the suffrage amendment in Congress, the methods of Congressional action, and the plans and policy of the Union.

The NWPs political strategy was twofold to demand a federal amendment and to hold the party in power responsible for the failure of its enactment.

Because many NWP members might have been shocked by their more radical tactics, the NWP used a balance of traditional and non-traditional rhetoric and femininity in its internal communication. The Suffragist contained lengthy descriptions of NWP activities described in terms that framed them as moderate and traditional. Marches and parades were described as things of beauty and descriptions of those involved in the NWPs activities often referred to the womens families.

Once women had been educated in the workings of the government and energized to take action, the NWP had to convince suffragists that its militant tactics and focus on a Federal Amendment were the only ways to win suffrage. To gain passage of a suffrage amendment, the NWP focused its energies on less traditional, more militant tactics. The NWP justified it choices by arguing that state-by-state campaigns were too expensive, would take too long, and were too risky. The NWPs militant tactics demonstrated womens commitment to the cause as they mobilized supporters and pressured the government to take action on suffrage.

Militant NWP activists delivered pointed political messages chat challenged traditional norms for women. To counterbalance negative perceptions of these methods, they feminized their actions. The NWP paid careful attention to beautiful costumes, parades filled with elaborate floats, striking banners, and sashes of colored satin. Much of the militancy associated with NWP strategies stemmed from the controversy over women undertaking such actions in public. In other words, what is viewed as militant can vary. The traditional roles for women and their behavior affected how the public viewed the NWPs efforts. The simple acts of marching in a parade, carrying a banner, or picketing the White House became defiant, militant actions when carried out by women.

The NWPs innovative, non-traditional messages and tactics were made more palatable by careful attention to feminizing them. As part of their more radical tactics, the NWP countered the perception that suffragists were unsexed, fanatic women with feminine costumes and gestures. Plans for NWP demonstrations and parades stressed colorful, beautiful costumes and attractive floats covered with flowers. NWP activists appealed for their cause in tableaux vivants with characters dressed in flowing costumes, sent Suffrage Valentines and birthday cakes to senators, and hung flower-filled May baskets on the White House fence.

The NWPs first Washington, D.C, action was the march before Woodrow Wilsons inauguration on March 3, 1913, which followed months of careful planning and fundraising by CU executive committee members in Washington. The march required a great deal of money, and the CU formed a mens committee that was committed to raise 100,000, while the CU executive committee would raise 6,000. Substantial funds were needed because the CU (later the NWP) had not been involved in such public actions and needed to make enough banners, costumes, floats, and sashes to outfit between 5,000 and 8,000 people. Although the costs were high, the money raised far exceeded expenditures.

The procession began at the Capitol, moved up Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, and ended in a mass meeting at the Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Participants included women in costumes, floats, banners, suffrage groups from across the country, government dignitaries, bands, horses, the CU mens committee, and the CU executive committee. Like all the women who participated in any of the NWPs actions, participants were dressed in costumes or in uniformly white fashionable, feminine styles of the day. In most of the demonstrations, the women wore white dresses that could be accented by purple or yellow satin sashes (to show the NWP colorswhite, purple, gold) or VOTES FOR WOMEN sashes or a badge from the womans home state or other organizational affiliation.

The NWPs march achieved strategic goals by attracting a great deal of press coverage. The March 4, 1913, issue of the New York Times highlighted its impact on inaugural festivities in an article titled, WILSON EVADES VAST CROWDGoes by Side Streets to Hotel While Suffrage Parade is On, which described the NWPs impact on Wilsons reception

Woodrow Wilsons arrival in Washington to-day was not accompanied by the wildly enthusiastic welcome that might have been experienced. It was a strange greeting for the man who is to rule the Nation for the next four years. The suffragist parade was to blame. The crowds had found it a greater attraction.

Along with the women in costume and formation, the marches, parades, demonstrations, and other militant activities always included banners. One style of banner carried by NWP activists for most events consisted of the NWP tricolor, a banner suspended from a t-shaped carrier that consisted of three horizontal strips of fabric (purple, yellowgold, and white) sewn together.

Another tactic used was the voiceless (or living) speech. Similar to a message banner, a voiceless speech allowed NWP activists to present non-traditional messages in a silent, nonverbal, feminine fashion. Harriot Stanton Blatch describes the tactic of a voiceless speech in her January 28, 1913, letter to Alice Paul

You mount cards on an easel in the order of the list I am enclosing you leave the first in place until the crowd has read it, and then show the next one and so on. Mrs. Rogers is going to Washington on Thursday and will give any kind of information on the subject as she is the one who introduced it here. It was first used in the Ohio campaign.

Blatchs letter goes on to list thirty-one different cards to be used in a sample voiceless speech. The voiceless speech offered NWP members the opportunity to speak without breaking taboos against women speaking in public.

Many of these tactics also helped decrease the tension between speaking as a woman and speaking effectively. Because women had been kept from participation in politics, they lacked both public speaking experience and credibility. Now that NWP members were entering the public arena, they faced not only the taboo against women speaking in public and their lack of public speaking experience but also audiences hostile to their cause. The NWPs use of visual tactics parades, demonstrations, banners and costumesassisted women to overcome many of the obstacles they faced while allowing them to craft effective, pointed messages that were well adapted to the speakers and their audiences.

The NWPs persistence kept attention focused on them in Washington, D.C. In June 1917, NWP pickets began marching in front of the White House every day in a perpetual delegation to the president. The pickets ignored the weather, angry mobs, nasty crowds, and sore feet as they returned to the picket line day after day. Their constant presence at the White House gates and on the front pages of major newspapers across the country reminded the agents of change of the intensity of NWP commitment and made it clear that woman suffrage would be an inescapable part of the political agenda until the vote was won. In this manner, the NWP maintained constant pressure on the president and members of Congress while also dramatizing their message.

At first, the pickets were to be silent sentinels, but as time went on, the women engaged in educating, conversing, and debating with passersby. As Belinda Stillon Southard comments, The Silent Sentinels ultimately constituted a militant identity as women fighting for political voice. The Sentinelss simultaneous incorporation and subversion of dominant ideologies empowered and, shaped their militant identity and generated a unique brand of militancy. The early pickets carried out the NWPs nonverbal, traditional actions by picketing in silence and carrying banners identifying the theme of the day. The later and most common pickets embodied militant action as they verbally jousted with onlookers, carried specific, militant message banners, resisted arrest, and were arrested.

The NWPs militant tactics did not diminish in the face of crowd violence or the threat of arrests and imprisonment. The arrests and imprisonments did not quiet the NWPs call for a federal amendment. The NWPs non-traditional tactics had attracted attention and support beyond its wildest dreams. The Wilson administrations fatal mistake lay in its assumption that the arrests and imprisonments would denigrate the NWP and draw attention from its cause.

In August of 1917, members of the House and Senate discussed whether or not woman suffrage should be a war measure. In both houses, discussions made reference to the NWP pickets, but both bodies decided it was too early to take action. The NWP pickets continued as President Wilson included suffrage in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1918. The NWP pickets ended their protest by calling on President Wilson to act immediately to passage in the Senate.

Finally, President Wilson called for a Special Session of Congress to convene on May 19, 1919. Early in May, President Wilson had secured the final vote needed for suffrage when he convinced Senator Nathaniel Harris of Georgia to vote for the suffrage amendment. The NWP had finally obtained action the president saw that suffrage must pass if his party was to survive. In Iron-Jawed Angels, Linda Ford provides the details of Wilsons final conversion to suffrage

The embarrassment of NWP demonstrations, their constant presence, and the pressure they generated on the President directly and indirectly from the public, did have an effect on Wilson. They definitely helpedmove him to take the last step. Wilson the politician, reading the public tide and avoiding any more political embarrassment, finally acted to ensure the woman suffrage amendment by persuading the last Senator and calling a special session.

In order to gain as much press coverage as possible from its varied tactics, the NWP formed a press bureau that developed savvy public relations strategies. The NWP press bureau assured that news of the NWPs activities reached the general public and politicians. The NWP was the first organization to combine militant, innovative actions with sustained efforts to gain press coverage. Unlike other womens organizations who bought space in newspapers for woman suffrage advertisements, the NWP had press agents who supplied newspapers with press releases and scoops.

The NWPs activities were planned to attract optimal press coverage. Stories about NWP events before they occurred that appeared in large and small papers across the country demonstrated the effectiveness of press bureau. The NWPs public relations enhanced the impact of militant and visual strategies, which were also newsworthy and appealing to journalists. Alice Paul realized that widespread press coverage of NWP actions would pressure and eventually embarrass the agents of change. The Wilson administration was particularly vulnerable after U.S. entry into World War.
World War I began in the midst of the NWPs activities, and it presented them with a difficult dilemma. When the Civil War began, womans rights activists discontinued their efforts in order to support the Union. After the war ended, women hoped that their contributions would be rewarded with suffrage, but they were disappointed. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, NAWSA leaders were similarly ready to defer their demands for suffrage. NAWSA members ended up fighting more for the war and less for suffrage.

Alice Paul and the NWP disagreed with the NAWSAs stand. Paul saw U.S. entry into World War I as an opportunity, not an obstacle. She realized the potential benefit of not waiting to fight for suffrage until after the war ended. Alice Paul knew that the rise in patriotism spurred by the war might increase antagonism toward the NWP, but she also realized that heightened patriotism would be the perfect backdrop for the NWPs calls for democracy and freedom for women.

Not until late in World War I did the rest of the country begin to realize the importance and persuasive potential of well-orchestrated public relations campaigns. Alice Paul and the NWPs press bureau preceded George Creel and his Committee on Public Information (CPI) by at least five years. As the NWP planned events designed to attract publicity and distributed press releases that gave the NWP a wholesome spin, they offered the country a glimpse of what was to comea world in which spontaneous and staged events could not be distinguished.

The NWP and Alice Paul Contributions to Woman Suffrage
Because the NWP came into existence near the end of a social movement that had engaged in ongoing persuasive campaigns throughout the nation for over fifty years, the NWP assumed that a majority already agreed with their cause. Accordingly, the NWP was faced with the problem of mobilizing their audiences to action. The voice of the NWP was the voice of Alice Paul. She argued that the only way women could win the vote was by holding the party in power responsible, adapting to journalistic norms to ensure press coverage, agitating to make their presence known (militancy),  lobbying the agents of change, and focusing on a single issuethe vote. The rhetoric of the NWP mobilized those who already believed in enfranchisement for women.

Although Alice Paul and the National Womans Party (NWP) played a key role in the battle for a federal amendment, they did not act alone. The NWPs brilliant battle for suffrage came at the end of a mature movement for womens rights. When the NWP entered the struggle for a federal amendment most people were familiar with the arguments for woman suffrage. Womens movement members and supporters, however, needed to re-energize their effort to gain woman suffrage.

Alice Paul, the NWP, and its politically savvy strategies provided the spark necessary to re-kindle the suffrage fire. The NWPs strategies and its influence on the press mobilized suffragists and cast suffrage as an issue that the Congress and the president could no longer ignore. The work of the U.S. womans movement from 1848 forward and especially the work of the NAWSA and Carrie Chapman Catts pragmatic Winning Plan laid the groundwork for the NWPs tightly focused, successful campaign.

To Catt and Paul the Winning Plan and the NWPs militant actions and focus on a federal amendment seemed incompatible. Paradoxically, the two strategies were complementary. Although Catt and Paul might not have agreed, their strategies reinforced each other. Although Alice Paul did not publicly criticize NAWSA or Carrie Chapman Catt, evidence from the NWP papers reveals that the NAWSA had tested her patience. A letter from NWP field worker Dora Lewis admonished Paul and asked her to use tact when corresponding with the NAWSA president

Mrs. Catt, at my request, is writing to you. Please write her very fully and very politely (you were not polite the day we met them at the New Willard, and I was a little disappointed in you, for I think we lose something when we do not maintain an absolutely equible demeanor, now, please dont show this to anybody, it is only meant for you) about these matters.

In a sense Catt was right, because it seemed that no organization could simultaneously embrace the NWPs strategies and the Winning Plan yet, because of the political and cultural climate of the time, both were necessary. Catt saw the NWP as an anathemairresponsible radicals whose idea of holding the party responsible was utterly wrongheaded and whose actions were detrimental to the cause of suffrage. Vivian Gornick disputes this view Carrie Chapman Catt could not see that Alice Pauls activism revitalized NAWSA and brought to an entire nation the urgency of womans suffrage as probably no other kind of action could have. The NWP put suffrage at the top of the national agenda and used constant pressure to demonstrate womens tireless commitment to the right to vote.

Catts Winning Plan systematically increased the numbers of pro-suffrage politicians and enfranchised women who elected them. Both the NAWSA and the NWP were committed to the same goalwoman suffrage. The two different leaders, their moderate and militant organizations, and their traditional and non-traditional strategies all worked together to forge a suffrage victory.

The NWPs strategies also assisted women in overcoming the numerous obstacles to women entering the public arena. The NWPs rhetoric of mobilization came at a particularly hard time for women who wanted to speak in public or participate in any movement. Although womens roles adjusted during World War I, the Cult of True Womanhood still held women hostage in the private sphere while also encouraging their submission. The mobilization rhetoric of the NWP provided women of the era with the tools necessary to participate successfully in the public arena. The irony of the feminine, traditionally dressed NWP activists engaging in non-traditional, militant rhetoric enabled women socialized into submissiveness to act.

The feminine style of NWP activists and many of their activities made the actions and goals more palatable to the audiences and to the women involved. The traditional framing of NWP activists and their activities assisted suffragists in overcoming an increasingly well-organized opposition. The anti-suffragists strongest social arguments stemmed from the cult of true womanhood,  a set of attitudes and norms of special force for advantaged white women who were likely to be the wives of business leaders and politicians, men of great influence in this struggle.

Alice Paul and the NWP believed that the tradition of representative government and Americans belief in freedom and democracy, emphasized in Wilsons war rhetoric, would counteract the anti-suffragists power while assisting their battle for enfranchisement. Anti-suffragists believed that the long-standing tradition of the appropriate roles for women would outweigh such vague political values.

Even though anti-suffragists were well-organized and heavily funded, they were no match for the NWPs timing, public relations efforts, and political sense. The NWPs fusion of traditional and nontraditional elements in its rhetoric of mobilization counteracted the anti-suffragists as it energized supporters. Activists had been fighting for womens rights since at least 1848 and those involved were accustomed to the arguments of the opposition and the slow pace of change.

When the NWP entered the battle for suffrage, the womans movement needed fresh approaches that could mobilize the energies of individual suffragists and reactivate the entire movement. The NWPs rhetoric achieved that by enlivening familiar arguments for suffrage, making the goal of a federal amendment seem attainable, pressuring and influencing the agents of change, and empowering women.
Alice Pauls impact on the NWPs rhetorical style should not be underestimated. The NWPs entry into the suffrage battle near the end of a mature social movement allowed Paul to make her rhetorical choices with knowledge of what tactics had and had not worked previously. In addition, her background as a Quaker, her experiences with the Pankhursts in England, her fierce dedication to the cause, and her advanced understanding of politics and public relations all contributed to the success of what would become the NWPs rhetoric of mobilization.

Vivian Gornick argues that when Paul returned to the United States from England in 1910, she brought the suffrage movement two things, the boldness of outrageous tactics and the ideabrought from England--that the suffragists must hold the party in power responsible for not passing the federal amendment. Holding the party in power responsible was less successful in the United States because of differences in the political system.

Campbell argues that Pauls policy of holding the party in power responsible had some merit because, it reflected a realistic assessment of the power of the Democratic Caucus in Congress and its influence on the floor and in committees. The policy was less successful in the state-by-state ratification process because of Republican majorities in many state legislatures.

Alice Pauls fierce dedication to woman suffrage and womens rights was fueled by her background as a Quaker and her experiences in England. Inez Haynes Irwin points to her intense, fanatical devotion to her cause, which was absolute. She loved books, for example, but during her battle for woman suffrage, she would not allow herself to enter a bookstore lest she be tempted to buy books not related to the cause.

NWP worker Anne Martin was quoted as saying, Alice Paul made a vow not to think or to read anything that was not connected with Suffrage until the Amendment was passed. In the NWP headquarters and museum, the explanation card next to a revolving bookshelf at Pauls bedside stated that she rarely slept. If someone forced her to go to bed, she would lie awake and read, until a reasonable amount of time had passed and it was safe to go back to work.

Her understanding of politics and the value of public relations was greatly enhanced during her time in Great Britain. As she joined the Pankhursts in their battle for suffrage, Paul began to understand the need to understand and influence the government. As Alice Paul participated in the Pankhursts militant actions and saw the press coverage their militant actions gained without the work of a press bureau or a comprehensive public relations plan, she realized the potential of implementing a formal press bureau for suffrage activities in the United States. Alice Pauls experiences in Great Britain, her motivation, and innovative ideas made the group she led different from any other womans group.

Conclusion
In early 1900s, after years of utilizing the strategy of campaigning for suffrage state-by-state, some became disillusioned that this method would work to achieve enfranchisement. The primary suffrage organization in power at the time, the NAWSA, became mired at the state and local level, settling into a low-keyed, plodding pace that characterized it until 1913. Some members of the NAWSA became dissatisfied and the suggestion to push for a federal amendment seemed a plausible strategy. The conservative and traditional leaders of the NAWSA saw no need to change the current strategy or philosophy of the movement until Alice Paul joined the ranks.

The combination of the NWPs innovative tactics, its focus on a single goal, its political and public relations savvy, and its ability to mobilize women and the government to act made it different from other womens rights organizations. The NWP was the first organization to gain successful coverage by the press, to mobilize women and Congress to action, and to make use of both traditional and non-traditional strategies.

Faced with the NWPs activities and their role in gaining suffrage, one is led to ask As a specific effort that came into being near the end of a larger, tired social movementwhat made the NWP able to agitate and mobilize women and agents of change to take action The answer is in its organizational force, the Suffragist its militant, visual tactics its traditional tactics its press bureau and public relations savvy and its decision to continue its work during World War I.

The NWPs innovative strategies worked together to create a steady pressure on Congress and the president. Each tactic became more successful due to the NWPs savvy use of and knowledge of the political system. As a result, the NWP played a key role in the passage of a federal suffrage amendment. Women who voted for the first time in 1920 should not be the only ones to gain from the experience and savvy of Alice Paul and the NWP.