A new exhibit honors a South Jersey women's rights pioneer

In June 1909, Alice Paul sent a letter to her mother from London. "Dear Mamma. . . I have joined the 'suffragettes' - the militant party of the women's suffrage question," it began.

About six months later, a New York Times report said that Paul's screams were heard "resounding through the prison" in London when painful force-feedings were implemented to stop a hunger strike by the suffragettes. Paul mailed another message to her childhood home in Mount Laurel and addressed it to her mother, Tacie: "I am sorry thee was so worried.. . . Many other women are doing it, why should not I? Their parents do not make a fuss about it."

Alice Paul's handwritten letters and pages from her mother's diary offer a glimpse into the private life of the young Quaker woman from South Jersey who became a leader in the struggle to win a woman's right to vote in America after learning civil disobedience tactics in England. The items are part of a new exhibit at Paulsdale, the 200-acre farmstead in Burlington County where Paul was born and raised.

"Her mother had hosted meetings for local suffragettes in her home" but was upset about her daughter's activities in England, said Lucienne Beard, executive director of the Alice Paul Institute, the nonprofit that operates Paulsdale, which is a national historical landmark. When Alice Paul returned home, she brought "tactics she had learned back to America and woke up a very sleepy women's suffrage movement," Beard said.

The two-room exhibit at Paulsdale chronicles Paul's role in organizing protest marches in Washington, including a violent one that drew 8,000 demonstrators on March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. She was arrested in England and the United States 10 times and imprisoned five times, three in England and two in the U.S.

After she was arrested in Washington for obstructing traffic, she organized a hunger strike while confined at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia and told her mother that the force-feeding she endured was "exceedingly painful." She said that she was held down and her head was pulled back while doctors poured thick fluids into her nostrils three times a day. It caused her to become gravely ill, she said.

After the 19th Amendment passed, bringing women the right to vote in 1920, Paul turned her attention to the Equal Rights Amendment. A single woman, she began researching it while attending law school at American University in Washington and wrote it in the hopes it would bring broader guarantees of gender equality, including in the workplace and in higher education.

"The ERA was really her life's work," Beard said. The ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923, approved, and sent to the states for ratification. Only 36 states approved it, three states short of its winning final passage. Various women's organizations continue the effort to get the ERA passed today.

The ERA became the work of the National Women's Party, which Paul created in 1917 after she and her activist colleague Lucy Burns were ousted from the more traditional women's suffrage associations. The two were shunned because they had advocated using militant tactics, such as disrupting meetings and organizing mass rallies, and for not behaving "in ladylike fashion," said Barbara Irvine, a founder of the Alice Paul Institute.

Paul has not been recognized in American women's history as a giant as Susan B. Anthony and others were, but she was instrumental in securing a woman's right to vote, Irvine said. "She came in on the tail end of a 72-year struggle to get it passed and saw the successful conclusion of it.. . . Because of the spectacle of the public events she orchestrated, she is credited with having played a significant role" in moving the amendment forward, Irvine said.

Kristina Myers, the program director at Paulsdale, said the exhibit was created through $30,000 in grants from the New Jersey Historical Commission and $30,000 in private donations and fund-raising. "We needed something to accommodate the growing number of visitors we were getting at Paulsdale," Myers said, adding the exhibit took about four years to design. She said Paulsdale gets about 700 to 1,000 visitors a year.

A series of panels were created to depict Paul's work and achievements, which spanned several decades before she died in 1977. A lifesize photograph of Paul toasting passage of the 19th Amendment with a raised glass of grape juice appears in the former parlor at Paulsdale. Several of the six diplomas that she earned were also framed and hung in the parlor. She earned three law degrees from American University, a master's and doctorate in sociology and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a bachelor's degree in biology from Swarthmore College.

Old photographs of Paul and her family and other artifacts also are on display in the two-story farmhouse.

Since Paul had been a Quaker, she had few personal possessions, giving the institute little to work with when it created the exhibit, Beard said. Among them are an engraved pencil case and her family's dark-wood bookcase, which was restored. It contains a sampling of poetry books, Charles Dickens, and mystery novels that Paul had enjoyed.

Before the exhibit was created, Paulsdale was primarily a place where the institute held educational programs, including those designed to instill leadership qualities in young girls in the spirit of Alice Paul. These programs are still the focus of Paulsdale, while the exhibit is open to the public four afternoons a week, Tuesdays through Fridays, and some Saturdays. Donations are accepted and tours are $5.

Some of the items and letters were previously stored or exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in D.C., the Schlesinger Library of American Women's History at Harvard University, the Mount Laurel Library, and at Paulsdale.

Beard said that Paul's handwritten letters are revealing because she did not leave behind any journals that contained details of her thoughts and feelings. The letters "show you more about her personality, and she comes across as livelier" than her reputation of a serious, hardworking woman, Beard said. She said that she can imagine Paul's mother, then a widow with four children, sitting in Paulsdale in the early 1900s and reading the letters from her oldest daughter, Alice. "She was panicking and reached out to the embassy to try to get her daughter to come home," Beard said.

One of the suffragette organizers who had marched with Alice Paul in England had reached out to Tacie to tell her not to worry. "She's so unselfish and has so much courage that she is always eager to take part in the most dangerous and difficult work," Christabel Pankhurst wrote to Tacie. Pankhurst's mother, Emmeline, another suffragette leader, had called Alice Paul a hero. That was years before Paul became famous for continuing the struggle and helping win a victory for women in America.

jhefler@phillynews.com

856-779-3224 @JanHefler