Talk: Alice Paul & Women's Right to Vote
Tuesday, March 20
at 7 - 8:30 pm


Hughes Main Library
25 Heritage Green Pl, Greenville, SC 29601

How did a nice young Quaker woman with BA from Swarthmore and an MA & PhD from U Penn, end up being force-fed in a city jail and confined to a prison psychiatric ward? As the psychiatrist who examined her said:  "Courage in women is often mistaken for Insanity." 

Alice Paul and her "Silent Sentinels" were beaten, jailed and force-fed on their crusade to obtain the right to vote for American women. Their charge for arrest: blocking traffic. In 1923 she proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. She fought for it until her death in 1977. A revised version was passed by Congress in 1974, but has yet to be ratified. - Let's talk about it.

This event is NOT a costumed performance. (Leslie Goddard will perform as Alice Paul in the History Alive Festival June 15 -24.)

More . .
Led by Dr Melissa Walker

Melissa Walker, PhD is Emerita George Dean Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at Converse College where she taught for 21 years. She earned her PhD at Clark University, and her work focused on the study of past women's efforts to become autonomous and fulfilled human beings and on projects that empower today's women.

She is the author or editor of nine books including, "All We Knew Was To Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941."  She is Spartanburg Regional Hospital System staff historian, and founder of  Heyday Coaching,  a personal and career coaching service,
The outcry for Women's Suffrage was International

As the 20th century began, the colonies of New Zealand and Australia were the first to jump aboard and by 1920 Britain and the US had joined. It was in England that Alice Paul joined the women's suffrage efforts and learned militant protest tactics. This event is a part of Upstate International Month.   upstateinternational.org/ui-month/