9 August 2017 ALICE PAUL AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS: FROM THE VOTE TO THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT by Deborah Kops, Calkins Creek, February 2017, 216p., ISBN: 978-1-62979-323-8

“A good man pays his debt

But you ain’t paid yours yet

Even it

Even it up”

-- Heart (1980)

“Yesterday, after reading the news, my daughter asked me a question. “Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?”

That question, whether it’s been asked outright, whispered quietly, or simply lingered in the back of someone’s mind, has weighed heavily on me throughout my career in technology. Though I’ve been lucky to work at a company where I’ve received a lot of support...my experience in the tech industry has shown me just how pervasive that question is.

Time and again, I’ve faced the slights that come with that question. I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt.

So when I saw the memo that circulated last week, I once again felt that pain, and empathized with the pain it must have caused others. I thought about the women at Google who are now facing a very public discussion about their abilities, sparked by one of their own co-workers. I thought about the women throughout the tech field who are already dealing with the implicit biases that haunt our industry (which I’ve written about before), now confronting them explicitly. I thought about how the gender gap persists in tech despite declining in other STEM fields, how hard we’ve been working as an industry to reverse that trend, and how this was yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science. And as my child asked me the question I’d long sought to overcome in my own life, I thought about how tragic it was that this unfounded bias was now being exposed to a new generation.”

-- Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube 8/8/17

Alice Paul in 1909, at age 24:

“At the jail, Alice Paul and Amelia Brown went through the usual drill: they demanded first-division status [like political prisoners and those who had committed minor offenses], were refused, and went on a hunger strike. But the prison rules had changed, and Paul knew she would not be leaving anytime soon. Instead of releasing suffragettes on hunger strikes for medical reasons, the prison now force-fed them.

On the third day, Paul experienced the ordeal that she had been dreading: Prison matrons wrapped her in a blanket and put her in a chair. A doctor inserted a long tube through one of her nostrils into her stomach and poured milk and liquid food down the tube. ‘When it was over I was trembling from head to foot from shock, was covered with perspiration, felt sick at the stomach & my nose bled for about ten minutes,’ Paul wrote her mother. She was fed twice each day until she served her entire one-month sentence. Because Paul resisted, she was restrained by sheets tied around her and by three matrons, one of whom sat astride her knees. It usually took about three tries before the doctor got the tube all the way down to her stomach.”

Alice Paul in 1963, at age 78:

“A civil rights bill, which had stalled in the House of Representatives for months, seemed likely to get moving again after President Lyndon Johnson’s passionate speech in support of the bill. He had been sworn into office only five days earlier, on November 22, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And he was making the passage of this bill a priority.

The bill would make racial segregation illegal in public places such as restaurants, hotels, theaters, public libraries, and public schools. And under one heading, Title VII, the bill prohibited employees from discriminating against anyone because of his or her ‘race, color, religion, or national origin.’ Why not, Alice Paul thought, add another word to that clause: sex. That way, all women would be protected against discrimination in the workplace.

‘A great many of our members felt, ‘Well, you mustn’t take up these side things so often,’ Paul remembered. ‘But I felt this we must take up, absolutely must take up.’ She had never demonstrated support for or opposition to civil rights. Paul was an opportunist, a quality that troubled some of her admirers. She saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of the wave of support for African Americans to further the cause to which she had dedicated her life: equal rights for women.”

Back in the Sixties, our teachers were always instructing us to read the newspaper every day. I became a dedicated and thorough reader of Long Island’s Newsday, andI remember perusing the Help Wanted advertisements. At the time, they consisted of two sections: jobs for men and jobs for women. Suddenly, in the mid-Sixties, help wanted ad segregation ended. Now I know why that transformation took place.  

As a young woman who raised hell and got force-fed in jail while still fresh out of college, Alice Paul played a pivotal role in passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Women got the right to vote.

As an old lady, still driven to even it up, Alice Paul played a pivotal role in the insertion of the “sex amendment” into the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This led to the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision (EEOC) and the end of segregated Help Wanted sections. Just a few years before Susan Wojcicki was born, women won the right to be treated equally in the workplace.

Alice Paul’s opportunism, determination, and single-mindedness makes her an interesting historical figure. She was a petite Quaker woman who didn’t think twice about heaving rocks through Parliamentary windows and suffering the consequences if it succeeded in bringing attention to her cause, justice for women.

In ALICE PAUL AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS, Author Deborah Kop presents a well-written, well-sourced biography of this champion of women’s rights.

I was astonished to learn that Alice Paul was the one to write the proposed text for the Equal Rights Amendment--back in 1923! As the author explains, despite the failure to gain ratification of the ERA, the work Alice Paul did to get the “sex amendment” included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, coupled with enactment of Title IX a decade later, have led to such advances for women that, on a practical level, the ERA is no longer needed.

Not that the playing field has yet been evened up. Women are still paid less than men, and are underrepresented at the top, everywhere from corporate executive suites and boardrooms to the U.S. Congress. I hope that some young people who read about Alice Paul and who love and respect their mothers and sisters, will be inspired to raise hell and move up further in the right direction.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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