From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910-1928

1987 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
pp. 1293
Author(s):  
J. Stanley Lemons ◽  
Christine A. Lunardini
Keyword(s):  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Alice Paul

Passages: Feminism, Journalism, and the Transatlantic Twenties

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-242
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
International Treaties ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Great Demand ◽  
Complicated Problem ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Alice Paul

After the vote was won, Crystal Eastman hoped to transform successful but single-issue suffragism into a class- and race-conscious, transnationally minded feminism. She ran afoul of Alice Paul, unquestioned leader of the National Woman’s Party, who wanted another targeted single-issue campaign. By 1923, Eastman, Paul, and the organization agreed on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as their new “great demand.” In its all-encompassing simplicity, the ERA solved the problem of how a single-issue campaign could seek redress for the huge and complicated problem of gender inequality. Unfortunately, the idea splintered coalitions in the wider women’s movement, alienating the party from a whole network of once-compatible Progressive groups. Eastman, now living in her husband’s native London with their children, worked as a journalist, covering this debate. By 1926, little progress had been made, and she welcomed a fresh tack. She began working with Paul to campaign for equal rights provisions in international treaties.

scholarly journals Pioneering International Women’s Rights? The US National Woman’s Party and the 1933 Montevideo Equal Rights Treaties

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-437
Author(s):  
Paolo Amorosa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Pan American ◽  
Alice Paul

Abstract Histories of equal rights for women in international law normally begin with post-World War II initiatives. Such an approach leaves out two treaties signed at the 1933 Montevideo Pan-American Conference, the Equal Nationality Treaty and the Equal Rights Treaty, which remain forgotten among international lawyers. By reconstructing their inception and intellectual background, this article aims to raise awareness about debates on international law among feminist activists in the interwar years. In turn, the focus on activist work allows for the recovery of the contribution of women to the development of the discipline in that seminal period, a contribution usually obfuscated by men’s predominance in diplomatic and academic roles. By outlining the contribution of two key promoters of the Montevideo treaties – Doris Stevens and Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party – the article takes a step towards the re-inclusion of women’s rights activists within the shared heritage of international law and its history.

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

When the Old Left Was Young … and Went to Washington

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Consumer Rights ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
Old Left ◽  
National Woman's Party

This chapter introduces a group of young radicals, male and female, who ascended with surprising rapidity in the Roosevelt administration. Many of the younger group advocated women's sexual emancipation and conducted their personal lives accordingly. Women in the younger cohort were less likely to make “maternalist” arguments that stressed women's innate differences from men, and they identified less exclusively with women-only organizations. These women did not call themselves “left feminists,” but the term usefully distinguishes them from nonfeminist leftists and from the “pure” feminists of the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment antagonized advocates of wage and hour laws for women. However, not all women in government were left feminists. Those who were gained force from the fact that they often knew one another, through shared interests in labor, poverty, housing, public health and health insurance, consumer rights, and international peace—interdependent causes that in their vision had a feminist subtext.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Primary Identification ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union ◽  
Compensation Law ◽  
International League

Crystal Eastman drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet today, her legacy is ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. Why? Eastman was an intersectional thinker and activist, who bridged social movements, linking shared experiences of inequality under one emancipatory rubric. Yet politics and interpersonal alliances kept asking her to choose: one issue, one organization, one primary identification. Expansive, straddling, disquieting to dominant perspectives and institutional rank, Eastman fell through the main planks of historical memory.

Apostles of Equality: James Brown Scott and the Feminist Cause

2019 ◽  
pp. 245-311
Author(s):  
Paolo Amorosa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Short History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan American ◽  
Alice Paul ◽  
Nationality Law

Chapter 6 tracks the story of an unlikely alliance between Scott and leading feminist activists Doris Stevens and Alice Paul. The first section provides a short history of the women’s rights movement in the United States and details how Paul and Stevens rose to become key figures in the battle for women’s suffrage. Section 2 tracks the early interest by feminist activists in international politics. As Paul and Stevens moved toward internationalism, Scott moved closer to the positions of women’s rights activists by becoming a supporter of the equality of sexes under nationality law. Section 3 follows the collaboration between Scott and the feminist leaders. Beginning in 1928, the collaboration would peak in 1933 with the approval at the Montevideo Pan-American Conference of two equal rights treaties.

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