Women born in the 1880s

208 quotes found

"Alice Paul is a leader of action, not of thought. She is a general, a supreme tactician, not an abstract thinker. Her joy is in the fight itself, in each specific drawn battle, not in debating with five hundred delegates the fundamental nature of the fight. "The Executive Committee have provided a good enough phrase-To remove all the remaining forms of the subjection of women.' Let the delegates with the least possible debate adopt this phrase to serve for purpose, program and constitution." Of course she said nothing, but that, I believe, was Alice Paul's notion of what the Convention's action should be. "I will let you know what the first step is to be, how to act and when. Go home now and don't worry." These words were not printed in the program, but they seemed to be written between the lines...Is Alice Paul a radical? Is she even a liberal? Is she really a reactionary? These vague reformist terms are inappropriate in describing Alice Paul. Let us use the definite terms of the revolution. She is not a communist, she is not a socialist; if she is class-conscious at all her instincts are probably with the class into which she was born. But I do not think she is class-conscious. I think she is sex-conscious; she has given herself, body and mind and soul, to the women's movement. The world war meant no moment's wavering in her purpose, in fact she used the war with serene audacity to further her purpose. I imagine she could even go through a proletarian revolution without taking sides and be found waiting on the doorstep of the Extraordinary Commission the next morning to see that the revolution's promises to women were not forgotten! Alice Paul does not belong to the revolution, but her leadership has had a quality that only the revolution can understand."

- Alice Paul

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"Alice Paul comes of Quaker stock and there is in her bearing that powerful serenity so characteristic of the successful Quaker. Like many another famous general she is well under five foot six, a slender, dark woman with a pale, often haggard face, and great earnest childlike eyes that seem to seize you to her purpose and hold you despite your own desires and intentions. During that seven year suffrage campaign she worked so continuously, ate so little and slept so little that she always seemed to be wasting away before our eyes... Indifference is harder to fight than hostility, and there is nothing that kills an agitation like having everybody admit that it is fundamentally right. If you can so frame your issue or so choose your method of attack as to precipitate discussion and difference of opinion among honest men, so that all your followers become passionate explainers, you have put life into a movement. Alice Paul knows this and she is a master at framing a meaty issue. As I look back over that seven-year struggle I sometimes suspect that many bold strategies were employed more to revive the followers than to confound the enemy...Alice Paul's active leadership in the American feminist movement was almost an accident. She was a student at an English university intending to pursue the career of a scholar when she was caught up in the English militant movement and served a brief apprenticeship in jail. It was during this experience that she began to plan what she would do for women suffrage in America. American women owe much to the English militants, but this above all."

- Alice Paul

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"When my aunt informed me that we lived in the famous Latin Quarter, I experienced a little shock of surprise. When I discovered the size of the Latin Quarter, there was another surprise, and an even greater one when I realized that in this awful Quartier Latin were the great universities and Art Schools of France; the lovely old Luxembourg garden with the Medici Palace now used as the Senate Chamber; the Pantheon, the Westminster Abbey of France; the old Cluny Palace with its hoary relics and ruined walls; and on through a long list of less celebrated but equally interesting places. It is the Student Quarter of Paris, more foreign than French, alive with Russians, Poles, English and Americans. [...] Here you will find living side by side, the girl whose father has made a fortune in oil and has sent his daughter abroad to finish her education and the little girl from Australia who has saved up her pennies for years that she might come and study painting in Paris and who lives in a bare little room, hardly knowing where her next meal will come from, but trusting the God of the Quarter, "Luck." There is a more democratic spirit here in the midst of this undemocratic people than we find in America itself. E veryone meets on the common ground for work, the only aristocracy is that of ability and success. Each one is here for a purpose; the air throbs with industry, enthusiasm and genius. Iris most inspiring; you meet so many who are so much more advanced than you that their attainments are something to look forward to, so many whose work is so far below your standard that you feel you have something to start with and are not discouraged (Burk, 90-91)."

- Marguerite Zorach

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