Clinton, Paul and Couric—How Barriers Fall

In her memorable speech suspending her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said her campaign had shattered so many stereotypes about what women can do that “from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States.

“And that is truly remarkable,” she said.

Using that criteria, it is unremarkable, then, that a move in Congress to pay tribute to suffragist Alice Paul comes not from any of the 87 women members but from a male member from California (even one who got himself into a celebrated feud early in 2007 with female colleagues from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus).

Representative Joe Baca, a San Bernardino Democrat, rounded up 406 co-sponsors for his bill to award a posthumous gold medal to Alice Paul to commemorate her successful fight to win the vote for women.

The right to vote was extended to women with the 19th Amendment, effective in August 1920, concluding a battle begun 72 years earlier by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Alice Paul returned from studying in England early in the 20th Century, determined to pick up the cudgels. She reshaped the suffrage movement with revolutionary tactics that included direct challenges to President Woodrow Wilson during wartime.

Baca told the House he had been inspired by the movie Iron Jawed Angels, with Hilary Swank playing Alice Paul, which he said dramatized the “blood, sweat and tears that went hand in hand with the women’s suffrage movement. Alice Paul truly gave of herself. She motivated, she empowered women to fight, to have courage and to challenge the status quo.”

Her leadership “was unyielding, tenacious and never self-serving. She suffered imprisonment, solitary confinement and force feeding when [jail] officials tried to sabotage her hunger strike,” he said.

Baca said his two daughters are the beneficiaries of Alice Paul—and, as a Mexican American, so is he, part of the generations of minorities who benefited from the fight for equal rights. Last Saturday, Clinton spoke eloquently to more than 10,000 of her supporters about feminist goals that have been met and those still out of reach.

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time. That has always been the history of progress in America.

“Think of the suffragists who gathered at Seneca Falls [in 1848] and those who kept fighting until women could cast their votes. Think of the abolitionists who struggled and died to see the end of slavery. Think of the civil rights heroes and foot soldiers who marched, protested and risked their lives to bring about the end to segregation and Jim Crow.

“Because of them, I grew up taking for granted that women could vote. Because of them, my daughter grew up taking for granted that children of all colors could go to school together. Because of them, Barack Obama and I could wage a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination. Because of them, and because of you, children today will grow up taking for granted that an African American or a woman can, yes, become president of the United States.”

Alice Paul took nothing for granted. She didn’t expect those with power to give it up; she knew challengers had to take it. And she was a brilliant tactician with a sense of what drove politics. When existing suffrage organizations didn’t move politicians, Paul created a more radical National Women’s Party. When President Wilson appeared indifferent to the very idea of extending votes to women—at the time he was pushing democracy for all, overseas—she organized a suffrage parade on the eve of his inauguration in 1913.

Marchers were attacked but the headlines expanded support for the cause. Her activists organized the first-ever civilian protest in front of the White House, with some suffragists chaining themselves to the White House gates. Alice Paul and dozens of others went to jail and, when jailers force-fed her to end her hunger strike, she managed to get the word out. The subsequent outrage persuaded Wilson to reverse course and support the suffrage amendment.

Alice Paul continued organizing for another 50 years, working from a house a stone’s throw from Congress. She wrote the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. She lobbied successfully for Title VII of the 1964 Civil rights Act, which bans workplace discrimination.

Today, the Sewall-Belmont House is a nonprofit museum educating students of all ages about women’s struggle to win the vote and giving “Alice” awards to women who break barriers and set new precedents.

On Tuesday, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric will get this year’s “Alice.”

Board chair Audrey Sheppard said the focus on barriers broken, and on those that still remain, is “very timely” in the wake of Clinton’s narrow defeat in her presidential nomination bid.

Last Saturday, Clinton told her supporters to get on with the future.  She pledged her unequivocal support for Obama and urged her supporters to follow her lead this fall but also signaled she meant to keep pushing for women’s rights.

“When I was asked what it means to be a woman running for president, I always gave the same answer: that I was proud to be running as a woman but I was running because I thought I’d be the best president. But I am a woman and, like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious.

“I want to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us,” she said. “We must make sure that women and men alike understand the struggles of their grandmothers and mothers and that women enjoy equal opportunities, equal pay and equal respect.”

She also said that “it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours. Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. When you stumble, keep faith. When you’re knocked down, get right back up. And never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.”

Hillary Clinton—along with Katie Couric—passes along that lesson, which Alice Paul embodied in her struggles for equal rights that began a century ago.