A WOMAN'S WORK IS NEVER DONE!

I suggest you to see Iron Jawed Angels (Angeli d'Acciaio in Italian), a great movie I've seen last Saturday and which moved me a lot! The cast is amazing and tells the story of Alice Paul (New Jersey, 11th Jan 1885 - 9th July 1977),  who pushed for women's voting rights and led the Suffragist movement in the early '900!           

                

At first, she was a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association but then Alice left to form the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (group later renamed the National Woman's Party).

Known for using provocative visual media to make their point, and known as the "Silent Sentinels", the NWP members picketed the White House under the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1917, making them the first group to take such action. Alice was jailed in October and November of that year as a result of the protests.

She was placed in solitary confinement for two weeks and began a hunger strike. Doctors brutally forced a tube into her nose and down her throat, pouring liquids into her stomach three times a day for three weeks. Despite the pain and illness this caused, Alice refused to end the hunger strike.

Thanks to a spy, newspapers across the country ran articles about the suffragists' jail conditions and forced feedings. This news angered many Americans and the goverment released all the suffragists on November 27th and 28th, 1917.

Two years later (!!) women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Until she was debilitated by a stroke in 1974, passing away in 1977, Alice Paul continued her fight for women’s rights. A woman's work is never done!

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

Alice S. Paul