Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the late 1800s, women worked for broad-based economic and political equality and for social reforms, sought to change voting laws in order to allow them to vote. National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts to gain voting rights the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, worked for equal civil rights for women. Women who owned property gained the right to vote in the Isle of Man in 1881, in 1893, the British colony of New Zealand granted all women the right to vote. Most independent countries enacted women's suffrage in the interwar era, including Canada in 1917. Leslie Hume argues that the First World War changed the popular mood: The women's contribution to the war effort challenged the notion of women's physical and mental inferiority and made it more difficult to maintain that women were, both by constitution and temperament, unfit to vote. If women could work in munitions factories, it seemed both ungrateful and illogical to deny them a place in the polling booth.
But the vote was much more than a reward for war work. Extended political campaigns by women and their supporters have been necessary to gain legislation or constitutional amendments for women's suffrage. In many countries, limited suffrage for women was granted before universal suffrage for men; the United Nations encouraged women's suffrage in the years following World War II, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women identifies it as a basic right with 189 countries being parties to this Convention. In ancient Athens cited as the birthplace of democracy, only adult, male citizens who owned land were permitted to vote. Through subsequent centuries, Europe was ruled by monarchs, though various forms of parliament arose at different times; the high rank ascribed to abbesses within the Catholic Church permitted some women the right to sit and vote at national assemblies – as with various high-ranking abbesses in Medieval Germany, who were ranked among the independent princes of the empire.
Their Protestant successors enjoyed the same privilege into modern times. Marie Guyart, a French nun who worked with the First Nations peoples of Canada during the seventeenth century, wrote in 1654 regarding the suffrage practices of Iroquois women, "These female chieftains are women of standing amongst the savages, they have a deciding vote in the councils, they make decisions there like the men, it is they who delegated the first ambassadors to discuss peace." The Iroquois, like many First Nations peoples in North America, had a matrilineal kinship system. Property and descent were passed through the female line. Women elders could depose them; the emergence of modern democracy began with male citizens obtaining the right to vote in advance of female citizens, except in the Kingdom of Hawai'i, where universal manhood and women's suffrage was introduced in 1840. In Sweden, conditional women's suffrage was in effect during the Age of Liberty. Other possible contenders for first "country" to grant women suffrage include the Corsican Republic, the Pitcairn Islands, the Isle of Man, Franceville, but some of these operated only as independent states and others were not independent.
In 1756, Lydia Taft became the first legal woman voter in colonial America. This occurred under British rule in the Massachusetts Colony. In a New England town meeting in Uxbridge, she voted on at least three occasions. Unmarried white women who owned property could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807. In the 1792 elections in Sierra Leone a new British colony, all heads of household could vote and one-third were ethnic African women; the female descendants of the Bounty mutineers who lived on Pitcairn Islands could vote from 1838. This right was transferred; the seed for the first Woman's Rights Convention in the United States in Seneca Falls, New York was planted in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The conference refused to seat Mott and other women delegates from the U. S. because of their sex. In 1851, Stanton met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, shortly the two would be joined in the long struggle to secure the vote for women in the U.
S. In 1868 Anthony encouraged working women from the printing and sewing trades in New York, who were excluded from men's trade unions, to form Working Women's Associations; as a delegate to the National Labor Congress in 1868, Anthony persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work. The men at the conference deleted the reference to the vote. In the U. S. women in the Wyoming Territory could vote as of 1869. Subsequent American suffrage groups disagreed on tactics, with the National American Woman Suffrage Association arguing for a state-by-state campaign and the National Woman's Party focusing on an amendment to the U. S. Constitution. In 1881 the Isle of Man, an internally self-governing dependent territory of the British Crown, enfranchised women property owners. With this it provide
John Muir
John Muir known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, environmental philosopher and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America. His letters and books describing his adventures in nature in the Sierra Nevada, have been read by millions, his activism has helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and many other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he co-founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. In his life, Muir devoted most of his time to the preservation of the Western forests; as part of the campaign to make Yosemite a national park, Muir published two landmark articles on wilderness preservation in The Century Magazine, "The Treasures of the Yosemite" and "Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park". S. Congress to pass a bill in 1890 establishing Yosemite National Park; the spiritual quality and enthusiasm toward nature expressed in his writings has inspired readers, including presidents and congressmen, to take action to help preserve large nature areas.
John Muir has been considered "an inspiration to both Scots and Americans". Muir's biographer, Steven J. Holmes, believes that Muir has become "one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity," both political and recreational; as a result, his writings are discussed in books and journals, he is quoted by nature photographers such as Ansel Adams. "Muir has profoundly shaped the categories through which Americans understand and envision their relationships with the natural world," writes Holmes. Muir was noted for being an ecological thinker, political spokesman, religious prophet, whose writings became a personal guide into nature for countless individuals, making his name "almost ubiquitous" in the modern environmental consciousness. According to author William Anderson, Muir exemplified "the archetype of our oneness with the earth", while biographer Donald Worster says he believed his mission was "saving the American soul from total surrender to materialism." On April 21, 2013, the first John Muir Day was celebrated in Scotland, which marked the 175th anniversary of his birth, paying homage to the conservationist.
John Muir's Birthplace is a four-story stone house in East Lothian, Scotland. His parents were Ann Gilrye, he was the third of eight children: Margaret, David, Daniel and Mary, the American-born Joanna. His earliest recollections were of taking short walks with his grandfather. In his autobiography, he described his boyhood pursuits, which included fighting, either by re-enacting romantic battles from the Wars of Scottish Independence or just scrapping on the playground, hunting for birds' nests. Author Amy Marquis notes that he began his "love affair" with nature while young, implies that it may have been in reaction to his strict religious upbringing. "His father believed that anything that distracted from Bible studies was frivolous and punishable." But the young Muir was a "restless spirit" and "prone to lashings." As a young boy, Muir became fascinated with the East Lothian landscape, spent a lot of time wandering the local coastline and countryside. It was during this time that he became interested in natural history and the works of Scottish naturalist Alexander Wilson.
Although he spent the majority of his life in America, Muir never forgot his roots in Scotland. He held a strong connection with his birthplace and Scottish identity throughout his life and was heard talking about his childhood spent amid the East Lothian countryside, he admired the works of Thomas Carlyle and poetry of Robert Burns. He returned to Scotland on a trip in 1893, where he met one of his Dunbar schoolmates and visited the places of his youth that were etched in his memory, he never lost his strong Scottish accent despite having lived in America for many years. In 1849, Muir's family immigrated to the United States, starting a farm near Portage, called Fountain Lake Farm, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Stephen Fox recounts that Muir's father found the Church of Scotland insufficiently strict in faith and practice, leading to their immigration and joining a congregation of the Campbellite Restoration Movement, called the Disciples of Christ. By the age of 11, the young Muir had learned to recite "by heart and by sore flesh" all of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament.
In maturity, while remaining a spiritual man, Muir may have changed his orthodox beliefs. He wrote, "I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization. Elsewhere in his writings, he described the conventional image of a Creator, "as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater." When he was 22 years old, Muir enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, paying his own way for several years. There, under a towering black locust tree beside North Hall, Muir took his first botany lesson. A fellow student plucked a flower from the tree and used it to explain how the grand locust is a member of the pea family, related to the straggling pea plant. Fifty years the naturalist Muir described the day in his autobiography. "This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm." As a freshman, Muir studied chemistry with Profes
Yale College
Yale College is the undergraduate liberal arts college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other schools of the university were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was known as Yale College until 1887, when its schools were confederated and the institution was renamed Yale University. Established to train Congregationalist ministers, the college began teaching humanities and natural sciences by the late 18th century. At the same time, students began organizing extracurricular organizations, first literary societies, publications, sports teams, singing groups. By the mid-19th century, it was the largest college in the United States. In 1847, it was joined by another undergraduate degree-granting school at Yale, the Sheffield Scientific School, absorbed into the college in the mid-20th century; these merged curricula became the basis of the modern-day liberal arts curriculum, which requires students to take courses in a broad range of subjects, including foreign language, composition and quantitative reasoning, in addition to electing a departmental major in their sophomore year.
The most distinctive feature of undergraduate life is the school's system of residential colleges, established in 1932 and modeled after constituent schools of English universities. All undergraduates live in these colleges after their freshman year, when most live on the school's Old Campus; the Collegiate School was founded in 1701 by a charter drawn by ten Congregationalist ministers led by James Pierpont and approved by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut. Situated in Abraham Pierson's home in Killingworth, the college moved to New Haven in 1718 and was renamed for Elihu Yale, an early benefactor. Founded as a school to train ministers, original curriculum included only coursework in theology and sacred languages. Although early faculty, including Jonathan Edwards and Elisha Williams, maintained strict Congregational orthodoxy, by the time of the American Revolution subsequent rectors Ezra Stiles, relaxed the curriculum to include humanities and limited natural science education.
Scientific courses introduced by chemist Benjamin Silliman in 1801 made the college an early hub of scientific education, a curriculum, grafted into Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1847. As in many of Yale's sister institutions, debates about the expansiveness of the undergraduate curriculum were waged throughout the early 19th century, with statements like the Yale Report of 1828 re-asserting Yale's conservative theological heritage and faculty. In the century, William Graham Sumner, the first professor of sociology in the United States, introduced studies in the social sciences; these expanding fields of study were integrated with graduate schools of the university and amalgamated into a course of liberal arts education, which presaged the advent of divisional majors in the twentieth century. The relaxation of curriculum came with expansion of the extracurriculum. Student literary societies emerged as early as 1750, singing groups and student publications in the early 1800s, fraternities and secret societies in the mid-nineteenth century, intercollegiate athletics by the century's end.
Participation and leadership in these groups was an important social signifier and a route to induction into prestigious senior societies. Thus extracurricular participation became central to student life and social advancement, an ethos that became a template for collegiate life across the United States. By 1870, Yale was the largest undergraduate institution in the country; the growth of the student body prompted major growth in the college's physical campus, the greatest expansion of which occurred in 1933, when a gift of Edward S. Harkness created and endowed eight residential colleges. Modeled after the college system of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the colleges were intended to be the social and residential centers of undergraduate life while leaving academic programs under the oversight of university's departments. Two additional colleges were built by 1940, two more in the 1960s. For most of its history, study at Yale was exclusively restricted to white Protestant men the children of alumni.
Documented exceptions to this paradigm include Hawaiian native Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia, who became a student of Yale President Timothy Dwight in 1809, Black abolitionist James W. C. Pennington, allowed to audit theology courses in 1837. Moses Simons, a descendent of a slave-holding South Carolinian family, has been suggested to be the first Jew to graduate from Yale. Though his maternal ancestry is disputed, he may have been the first person of African American descent to graduate from any American college. In 1854, Yung Wing graduated from the college and became the first student from China to graduate from an American university, in 1857, Richard Henry Green became the first African American man to receive a degree from the college; until the rediscovery of Green's ethnic descent in 2014, physicist Edward Bouchet, who stayed at Yale to become the first African American PhD recipient, was believed to be the first African American graduate of Yale College. In the early 20th century, the student body was predominantly "old-stock, high-status Protestants Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians"—a group called "WASPS".
By the 1970s it was much more diversified. Enrollment at Yale only became competitive in the early 20th century, requiring the college to set up an admissions process; as late as the 1950s, tests and demographic questionnaires for admission to the college worked to exclude non-Christian men Jews, as well as non-white men. By the mid-1960s these pr
Thomas Anthony Thacher
Thomas Anthony Thacher was an American classicist and college administrator. Thomas A. Thacher was born in Conn. the son of Anne and Peter Thacher. His first American ancestor on his father's side was Thomas Thacher who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1635, became minister of the Old South Church in Boston, he had his preparatory training at the Hopkins Grammar School and graduated from Yale with the class of 1835. For a short time he held a temporary teaching position in New Canaan and went to a school in Georgia, to become Oglethorpe University. In all he spent three years teaching in two academies in Georgia, returning to Yale College on Dec. 1, 1838, to take the position of tutor. He was appointed assistant professor of Latin and Greek in 1842 and one year the title was restricted to Latin and he was given a year's leave of absence for study in Europe; this year was extended to two years and from 1843 to 1845 he studied in Germany and Italy. While in Berlin he instructed the Crown Prince of Prussia, his cousin, Prince Frederick Charles.
Six years after his return to Yale he was made professor of Latin. He was long a trustee of Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven and was a member of the state board of education 1866-77, he was on the committee for building the Yale Art School, serving with President Noah Porter and Professor Daniel Coit Gilman. Thacher was identified with Yale College more than any of his contemporaries. President Timothy Dwight V said of him, "His influence with the Faculty and the Corporation equaled or surpassed that of any other College officer." This extraordinary position was due not to his scholarship, although he had the reputation of being a sound and thorough scholar, but to his keen interest and constant activity in the management of college affairs both faculty and undergraduate. Before the day of deans, Thacher did much of the work, he was known as one of the best disciplinarians that the college had and yet he retained the devotion and affection of undergraduates to an extraordinary degree. As an undergraduate he had been "exuberant in spirit," and one, a student under him in Yale writes of "Tutor Thacher, the florid and fiery, of perpetual youth and enthusiasm."
He and Professor Theodore Dwight Woolsey were the first advocates at Yale of graduate instruction in non-technical fields and he himself was one of the first classicists to go abroad for the advancement of his scholarship. This scholarship was never productive, he edited Cicero's De Officiis in 1850, as a result of his work with Karl Zumpt in Berlin he published in 1871 A Latin Grammar for the Use of Schools, a translation of the work of Johan Nikolai Madvig. Aside from these productions, a few slight essays and book reviews in the New Englander make up his professional output. A teacher always, rather than an investigator, he seems to have had a suspicious attitude toward those who gave too much time to research. In his teaching he was too much of a disciplinarian and was sometimes thought to stick too rigorously to the grammar. To his work as administrator, Thacher brought exceptional qualifications and in this line lay his great achievements; as a teacher he contributed his share to the department's prestige while, with his strong convictions and fearless courage, his energy in raising and administering funds, his interest in people, his wide acquaintance with Yale alumni, his devout and conscientious character, he played a larger role in the building of modern Yale than that of any one of his contemporaries.
-- Clarence W. Mendell On Sept. 16, 1846, he married Olivia Day, better known as Livy, the daughter of President Jeremiah Day of Yale. She died on May 18, 1858, leaving five sons, on Aug. 1, 1860, he married her cousin Elizabeth Baldwin Sherman, who with three sons and one daughter survived him. Both wives were granddaughters of founding father Roger Sherman, his son Thomas Thacher was a prominent lawyer. His sons Sherman Day Thacher and William Larned Thacher were the founder of the Thacher School in Ojai, California, he was the paternal grandfather of US Solicitor General Thomas D. Thacher and Molly Kazan, the great-great-grandfather of actress and writer Zoe Kazan. List of Skull and Bones Members "Thomas Anthony Thacher." Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005. Http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC D. W. Allen, Geneal. and Biog. Sketches of the Descendants of Thomas and Anthony Thacher T. T. Sherman, Sherman Geneal.
Obit. Record, Grads. of Yale Coll. 1886. Record of the Class of 1835 in Yale Coll. W. L. Kingsley, Yale Coll.: A Sketch of Its Hist. Timothy Dwight, Memories of Yale Life and Men J. L. Chamberlain and Their Sons, Yale Univ. Noah Porter, in New Englander and Yale Review, May 1886 New Haven Evening Register, Apr. 7, 1886 files in the secretary's office, Yale Univ. Thomas Anthony Thacher at the Database of Classical Scholars Thomas Anthony Thacher Papers
Environmentalist
An environmentalist is a supporter of the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities". An environmentalist believes in the philosophy of environmentalism. Environmentalists are sometimes referred to using informal or derogatory terms such as "greenie" and "tree-hugger"; some of the notable environmentalists who have been active in lobbying for environmental protection and conservation include: Edward Abbey Ansel Adams Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad David Attenborough Sundarlal Bahuguna Patriarch Bartholomew I David Bellamy Wendell Berry Chandi Prasad Bhatt Murray Bookchin Stewart Brand David Brower Lester Brown Kevin Buzzacott Helen Caldicott Rachel Carson Charles, Prince of Wales Barry Commoner Jacques-Yves Cousteau Leonardo DiCaprio Rolf Disch René Dubos Paul R. Ehrlich Hans-Josef Fell Jane Fonda Mizuho Fukushima Rolf Gardiner Peter Garrett Al Gore James Hansen Denis Hayes Nicolas Hulot Tetsunari Iida John James Audubon Jorian Jenks Naomi Klein Aldo Leopold A.
Carl Leopold Charles Lindbergh James Lovelock Amory Lovins Hunter Lovins Caroline Lucas Mark Lynas Kaveh Madani Peter Max Bill McKibben David McTaggart Mahesh Chandra Mehta Chico Mendes George Monbiot John Muir Hilda Murrell Ralph Nader Gaylord Nelson Eugene Pandala Medha Patkar Alan Pears River Phoenix Jonathon Porritt Phil Radford Bonnie Raitt Theodore Roosevelt Ken Saro-Wiwa E. F. Schumacher Shimon Schwarzschild Vandana Shiva Gary Snyder Jill Stein Swami Sundaranand David Suzuki Candice Swanepoel Shōzō Tanaka Henry David Thoreau Greta Thunberg J. R. R. Tolkien Jo Valentine Dominique Voynet Harvey Wasserman Paul Watson Robert K. Watson Franz Weber Henry Williamson Shailene Woodley In recent years, there are not only environmentalist for natural environment but environmentalist for human environment. For instance, the activists who call for "mental green space" by getting rid of disadvantages of internet, cable TV, smartphones have been called "info-environmentalists". Environmentalism Global 500 Roll of Honour Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment Heroes of the Environment Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement Conservationist Conservation movement Conservation ethic Ecology movement Goldman Environmental Prize Green libertarianism Ecofascism Green conservatism List of peace activists List of people associated with renewable energy List of pro-nuclear environmentalists Greenpeace School strike for climate EnviroLink Network - A non-profit clearinghouse of environmental news and information
Muir Woods National Monument
Muir Woods National Monument is a United States National Monument managed by the National Park Service. It is located in southwestern Marin County, California, it is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is 12 miles north of San Francisco. It protects 554 acres, of which 240 acres are old growth coast redwood forests, one of a few such stands remaining in the San Francisco Bay Area; the Muir Woods National Monument is an old-growth coastal redwood forest. Due to its proximity to the Pacific Ocean, the forest is shrouded in a coastal marine layer fog, contributing to a wet environment that encourages vigorous plant growth; the fog is vital for the growth of the redwoods as they use moisture from the fog during droughty seasons, in particular the dry summer. The monument is cool and moist year round with average daytime temperatures between 40 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Rainfall is heavy during the winter and summers are completely dry with the exception of fog drip caused by the fog passing through the trees.
Annual precipitation in the park ranges from 39.4 inches in the lower valley to 47.2 inches higher up in the mountain slopes. The redwoods grow on brown humus-rich loam which may be stony or somewhat sandy; this soil has been assigned to the Centissima series, always found on sloping ground. It is well drained, moderately deep, to moderately acidic, it has developed from a mélange in the Franciscan Formation. More open areas of the park have shallow gravelly loam of the Barnabe series, or deep hard loam of the Cronkhite series. One hundred fifty million years ago ancestors of redwood and sequoia trees grew throughout the United States. Today, the Sequoia sempervirens can be found only in a narrow, cool coastal belt from Monterey County, California, in the south to Oregon in the north. Before the logging industry came to California, there were an estimated 2 million acres of old growth forest containing redwoods growing in a narrow strip along the coast. By the early 20th century, most of these forests had been cut down.
Just north of the San Francisco Bay, one valley named Redwood Canyon remained uncut due to its relative inaccessibility. This was noticed by William Kent, a rising California politician who would soon be elected to the U. S. Congress, he and his wife, Elizabeth Thacher Kent, purchased 611 acres of land from the Tamalpais Land and Water Company for $45,000 with the goal of protecting the redwoods and the mountain above them. The deal was facilitated by his activist wife, Laura Lyon White. In 1907, a water company in nearby Sausalito planned to dam Redwood Creek, thereby flooding the valley; when Kent objected to the plan, the water company threatened to use eminent domain and took him to court to attempt to force the project to move ahead. Kent sidestepped the water company's plot by donating 295 acres of the redwood forest to the federal government, thus bypassing the local courts. On January 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared the land a National Monument, the first to be created from land donated by a private individual.
The original suggested name of the monument was the Kent Monument but Kent insisted the monument be named after naturalist John Muir, whose environmental campaigns helped to establish the National Park system. President Roosevelt agreed, writing back: My Dear Mr. Kent: By George you are right!and, responding to some photographs of Muir Woods that Mr. Kent had sent him, Those are awfully good photos. Kent and Muir had become friends over shared views of wilderness preservation, but Kent's support for the flooding of Hetch Hetchy caused Muir to end their friendship. In December 1928, the Kent Memorial was erected at the Kent Tree in Fern Canyon; this tree—a Douglas fir, not a redwood—was said to be Kent's favorite. Due to its height of 280 feet and location on a slope, the tree leaned towards the valley for more than 100 years. Storms in El Niño years of 1981 and 1982 caused the tree to tilt more and took out the top 40 feet of the tree. During the winter of 2002–03, many storms brought high winds to Muir Woods causing the tree to lean so much that a fissure developed in January 2003.
This fissure grew larger as the tree leaned more and more, forcing the closure of some trails. On March 18, 2003, at around 8:28 pm, the tree fell; the closed trails have since been reopened. In 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was completed and park attendance tripled, reaching over 180,000. Muir Woods is one of the major tourist attractions of the San Francisco Bay Area, with 776,000 visitors in 2005. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, shortly before he was to have opened the United Nations Conference on International Organization for which delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to draft and sign the United Nations Charter. On May 19, the delegates held a commemorative ceremony in tribute to his memory in Muir Woods' Cathedral Grove, where a dedication plaque was placed in his honor; the monument was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 9, 2008. The main attraction of Muir Woods are the coast redwood trees, they are known for their height, are related to the giant sequoia of the Sierra Nevada.
While redwoods can grow to nearly 380 feet, the tallest tree in the Muir Woods is 258 feet. The trees come from a seed no bigger than that of a tomato. Most of the redwoods in the monument are between 800 years old; the oldest is at least 1,200 years old. Other tree species grow in the understory of the redwood groves. Three of t
National Woman's Party
The National Woman's Party is an American women's political organization formed in 1916 to fight for women's suffrage. After achieving this goal with the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the NWP advocated for other issues including the Equal Rights Amendment, still seeking ratification today; the most prominent leader of the National Woman's Party was Alice Paul, its most notable event was the 1917-1919 Silent Sentinels vigil outside the gates of the White House. The National Woman's Party was an outgrowth of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, formed in 1913 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to fight for women's suffrage; the National Woman's Party broke from the much larger National American Woman Suffrage Association, focused on attempting to gain women's suffrage at the state level. The NWP prioritized the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage throughout the United States. Alice Paul was linked to England's Women's Suffrage Political Union, organized by Emmeline Pankhurst.
While a college student in England, Paul became involved with the Pankhursts and their English suffrage campaign. During this time Alice Paul met Lucy Burns, who would go on and be a co-founder of the NWP. Although Paul was tied to the militant suffrage campaign in England, when she left to pursue suffrage in the United States, instead Paul pioneered civil disobedience in the United States. For example, members of the WSPU heckled members of parliament, spit on police officers, committed arson. While the British suffragettes stopped their protests in 1914 and supported the British war effort, Paul continued her struggle for women's equality and organized picketing of a wartime time president to maintain attention to the lack of enfranchisement for women. Members of the NWP argued it was hypocritical for the United States to fight a war for democracy in Europe while denying its benefits to half of the US population. Similar arguments were being made in Europe, where most of the allied nations of Europe had enfranchised some women or soon would.
After their experience with militant suffrage work in Great Britain, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns reunited in the United States in 1910. The two women were appointed to the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In March 1913, the two women organized the first national suffrage parade of 5,000–8,000 women in Washington, D. C. on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. This was designed as a political tactic to show the strength of women and to show that they would pursue their goals under Wilson's administration. Leading the parade was Inez Milholland who wore all white and rode on a white horse, which served as a symbol for the suffrage movement; this placement of Millholland at the start of the parade was strategic because of Mulholland's beauty, Paul knew she would attract media attention and followers. One of the criticisms of this first national suffrage parade was the barrier of colored women from participating side by side with white women. Though Paul never opposed black women getting the right to vote, she barred them from marching with the white women and forced them to be in the back of the parade with the men to appease southern women.
The parade devolved into chaos due to violent reactions from the crowd and a lack of support by the local police. The D. C. police did little to help the suffragists. After this incident, which Paul used to rally public opinion to the suffrage cause and Burns founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in April 1913, which split off from NAWSA that year. There were many reasons for the split, but Paul and Burns were frustrated with the National's slower approach of focusing on individual state referendums and wanted to pursue a congressional amendment. Alice Paul had chafed under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, as she had different ideas of how to go about suffrage work, a different attitude towards militancy. Catt disapproved of the radical strategies, inspired by the British "Suffragettes", Paul and Burns were trying to implement into the American Suffrage Movement; the split was confirmed by a major difference of opinion on the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment. This amendment was spearheaded by Alice Paul's replacement as chair of the National's Congressional Committee, was a compromise of sorts meant to appease racist sentiment in the South.
Shafroth–Palmer was to be a constitutional amendment that would require any state with more than 8 percent signing an initiative petition to hold a state referendum on suffrage. This would have kept the law-making out of federal hands, a proposition more attractive to the South. Southern states feared a congressional women's suffrage amendment as a possible federal encroachment into their restrictive system of voting laws, meant to disenfranchise the black voter. Paul and Burns felt that this amendment was a lethal distraction from the true and necessary goal of an all-encompassing federal amendment protecting the rights of all women—especially as the bruising rounds of state referendums were perceived at the time as damaging the cause. In Paul's words: "It is a little difficult to treat with seriousness an equivocating, childish substitute for the simple and dignified suffrage amendment now before Congress." Women associated with the party staged a innovative suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson's inauguration.
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