The National Woman's Party, a nonpartisan group devoted to equal rights for women, grew out of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1913. Alice Paul, the group's charismatic founder, organized militant public demonstrations on behalf of a federal amendment to grant women the right to vote. Taking at first the name "Congressional Union," a small group of predominantly young, white, middle- and upper-class women took to the streets to demand suffrage and, during the First World War, outraged the authorities, the public, and mainstream suffragists by picketing the White House and, when arrested, going on hunger strikes.
After the suffrage victory, the Woman's Party turned its attention to what it saw as the next step toward equality: the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced into Congress in 1923. This single-issue focus alienated African American women, working-class women, and socialist women who had rallied to the cause of militant suffragism in the last years of the struggle.
Because the ERA threatened to eliminate the special labor legislation that reformers hoped would protect vulnerable working women, the amendment found little support. Liberals and labor leaders feared that "equality" would mean further exploitation, and they accused the Woman's Party of callousness toward women working in industrial jobs.
After 1920 membership dropped off and the Woman's Party remained a small, exclusive group that attracted little new blood, although its aging members continued to carry the banner of feminism. In the 1970s, as legislative gains made the conflict over special labor legislation increasingly moot, a more progressive women's movement took up the ERA as a central goal. The National Woman's Party, headquartered in Washington, D.C., lives on as a remnant of earlier struggles and continues to work solely for women's equality.
Leila J. Rupp
See also
Suffrage Movement.
