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

"A Woman's Crusade" is a recently published book by Mary Walton. It tells the story of Alice Paul and her leadership of the National Woman's Pary in the fight for women's voting rights in the United States.

This is a well-written, readable book, accessible to the general reader. There has never before been such a book about Alice Paul, and Mary Walton deserves praise for according Paul the recognition in book form that was missing for such a long time.

Most of the book is taken up with details of the work of Paul and her allies in the period of 1913 to 1920, when the struggle for a federal suffrage amendment was at its height. For a suffrage buff like me, it was fascinating to learn about specific problems that Paul faced in organizing the great suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. in March 1913. The parade itself and the near-riot that ensued brought immense publicity to the suffrage cause.

Paul was remarkably adept at generating constant newspaper coverage and public attention for the campaign to adopt what became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Paul understood that ever-greater spectacle and sensation were needed to keep the suffrage issue in the forefront of the public's mind. Her tactics escalated to fierce criticism of President Woodrow Wilson, picketing of the White House, unjust arrest and imprisonment of Paul and her allies, hunger strikes, forced feedings and harsh mistreatment in prison of the militant suffragists.

Walton's account can be read as implying that Paul's militant tactics, single-minded leadership, the personal martyrdom through mistreatment of Paul and the other militants, and the resulting crescendo of publicity, were the key factors in bringing about the ultimate victory of the suffrage forces.

There is, however, a competing and more complicated narrative.

Both Alice Paul's supporters in the National Woman's Party and the adherents of Carrie Chapman Catt's NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association) wrote histories of the suffrage victory. In these histories, each camp slighted and minimized the contributions made by the other group. Many more recent accounts of the suffrage movement tend to adopt the preferred narrative of one camp or the other and thus fail to present a complete picture. This is not the case, however, in the classic "Century of Struggle" by Eleanor Flexner, which is still--more than 50 years after its original publication--the one essential book about the suffrage movement in the U.S.

Flexner's account gives high marks to Alice Paul for breathing life into the federal amendment campaign and for the personal sacrifices and the persecution that Paul and her followers suffered for what now are recognized as lawful protest tactics. But Flexner also accords great praise to the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, and suggests that she and her organization, with its hundreds of thousands of "feet on the street", were even more vital in harvesting the pro-suffrage sentiment that the militants did so much to generate.

I could write at length about particular topics in the suffrage fight that are told quite differently in Flexner's account than in Walton's. But in any case, Walton's book deserves a wide readership and tells a stirring version of the suffrage battle, as seen from the militants' point of view. At long last there is now a good biography of Alice Paul, and that is something to be glad about, for all lovers of women's history.

Well written historic account of the suffragette movement in the states. A real page turner, Mary Walton knows how to tell a story! Alice Paul's story was exhilarating and left me with a great sense of pride for her and the young women who dedicated themselves to this movement. Thanks for getting us the vote!! I will never take it for granted after having read this. I will say, I am appalled at how little I knew about the fight for women's suffrage prior to reading this book. I read this for a book club and I will speak for all of us - none of us knew 1/2 of the struggle these women went through and the book club has members male and female from age 27 to 55. Shame on the schools for not teaching this better.

As the review in Ms. Magazine pointed out last summer, the Walton biography of Alice Paul has very little new to say about this little-known personality. The HBO production Iron-Jawed Angels; Robert Cooney's Winning the Vote, which gives a good general account of both Alice Paul's Woman's Party and Carrie Chapman Catt's NAWSA and their contributions; Linda Ford's Iron-Jawed Angels, Christine Lunardini's From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights, Doris Stevens' Jailed for Freedom as well as other books about the woman suffrage movement have all given us the broad strokes about Alice Paul and her work. There are, of course, many people who have not heard of Alice Paul and her contribution to suffrage and for these people, the Walton book is valuable.

There still is no full-fledged biography of Alice Paul which answers the questions which have been raised about her: how did she rise to the top so quickly in the suffrage movement(she seems to come out of nowhere in 1913)? How did she inspire her followers--she was reportedly a retiring personality?

We will have to await a work that does more than scratch the surface for the answers to those questions.