When human beings encounter one another deeply,
in the midst of their struggles for freedom and equality and community,
prophetic power is unleashed.
Dan McKanan
Can you feel the heat when you picture Gandhi talking with Margaret Sanger? Can you imagine the intensity when Thich Nhat Hanh sat with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Stanton finds Anthony, Huerta and Chavez find Alinsky. How did Dorothy Day end up in a jail cell with Alice Paul? Could such provenance be by chance? Author Dan McKanan1 says a loud and studied no.
Beyond the wonder of such luminaries sharing space, challenging long-held beliefs or resting in rarely matched passion, McKanan proposes that something actually occurs when radicals converge. Is it an opening, an explosion, a remembering or a passing of a baton? Some would say it was destiny, maybe even prearranged. In fact most inhabitants of the earth, believing in reincarnation, would be comfortable thinking it was unavoidable. To me, both experientially and through historic discovery, access to the powers of radical activism happen at the point of genuine inquiry fueled by what has been stored within the heart, possibly for lifetimes.
As Mary Daly asserts, god is a verb and Emmeline Pankhurst states, deeds not words; there is a profound instant recognition that change-makers solicit, elicit, long for and celebrate. Could it be a tribal collected release or a divine spark awaiting ignition? It is impossible to measure and impossible to deny. The appearance of a relay demonstrates that activists, clearly radical activists, share a certain woof and warp. Frederick Douglass put it thus, it was only through his encounters with other radicals that he could get any, “glimpse of God anywhere.”
To know someone, you have to be willing to look at the trivial, the bad, the breadth and length of their reach, the peaks and their reaction to it all. Who loved them and who hated them is only half an understanding if it doesn’t lead to ask and answer why. To pass McKanan’s test of Prophetic Encounters with radical activists, Alice Paul exceeds anyone whose life is knowable. Her soul was ignited again and again. It was a dazzling and daunting path her falling foot created.
Certainly Miss Paul’s Quakerism set her stage from her very first breath. It was more than posture and buttoned boots. It was a refined and abiding regard for silence, for listening, for a seated community who respects the individual and assembled voice. From her family and home she saw equality as unquestioned. It was not unusual, it was threaded throughout. Her great aunt was a minister. Her mother attended college and it was expected Alice would too. The very notion of inequality with all its consequences was not in her early line of vision. Her family followed Elias Hicks, founder of Hicksite Quakerism. Another radical in his own right.
This young lady packed up her seemingly predictable life, privileged life, tennis racket and all, to begin college at Swarthmore. Her major was biology with the expectation that she would teach. All was game. set. match. until her senior year, when Alice met the new, thirty-year old professor who just completed his dissertation on the effects of poverty on women’s choices; Robert Clarkson Brooks. This Cornell graduate held seminar-style classes on the relationship of gender and class. Senior Alice Paul was examining the intersection of economics, politics and gender for the very first time. She was fully engaged and Professor Brooks took notice. He suggested that biology may not be her calling and to investigate social work.
Upon her graduation, Robert Brooks nominated Alice for a scholarship with the College Settlement Association (CSA). She was given several cities to pick from and chose New York. In 1905, she left her quiet religious home to live at College Settlement House, 95 Rivington Street, NYC and attend classes at the New York School of Philanthropy.
The young adults living there, most in their first paid job, were serving a neighborhood of extremely poor immigrants, many of whom were Russian Jews. Out in the streets was a mass of humanity constantly on the move. Somewhere in the center was the College Settlement House with lovely rooms, servants, privacy and safety. Alice had a room on the third floor room with a big window. Many times her college girlfriends visited, spending the night. These brand-new caseworkers were learning directly from the pioneers of social reform, participating with the birth of applied social work. It was there that Alice first met trade union women and learned about protection laws.
Alice also attended classes at the New York School of Philanthropy, a start-up which eventually became Columbia University’s School of Social Work. There she met women who would be at her side for years to come, Lavinia Dock, Jane Addams, and Florence Kelly who eventually opposed her. She was a renown overachiever, serious student, even head of the sewing club. Importantly she learned life was more than tennis, bowling, friends and socials. Alice found purpose: politics, economics and social reform. Alice was a fledgling social worker. After a year of intense demanding work she came to a conclusion which informed her entire life,
I could see that social workers were not doing much good in the world…
you knew you could not change the situation by social work.
Carrying forward that original spark from the Prophetic Encounter with Robert Clarkson Brooks, Alice left social work to study sociology, political science and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her Master’s Thesis was “Towards Equality.” She was nominated for a fellowship at the Quaker School in Woodbrooke, England. There her days were filled with silent prayer, lectures and games all under a Quaker rubric, Alice fed her driven curiosity with classes at the University of Birmingham where her next Prophetic Encounter awaited her.
Suffrage was on the march in Britain. From department store windows to table china, women voting was conversation across the Kingdom. The call for suffrage in the U.S. was polite and patient, serving tea and writing notecards to their legislators, epitomizing the term, lady-like. Nothing had happened there in close to sixty years but across the ocean, the Pankhurst family of London was heating things up. Fashionable ladies were speaking on streets, marching in unison, singing songs in public and collecting more attention than ever before. They were breaking convention, breaking windows, breaking the law and thereby arrested, jailed and force-fed to keep their fasting bodies alive.
Twenty-two year old Alice Paul was more than interested to hear this celebrated suffragette, twenty-seven year old, Christabel Pankhurst speak at Birmingham University December, 1907. When Christabel rose with much to say, Alice witnessed a life-changing moment. The crowd relentlessly jeered, booed, ridiculed and shouted down Christabel with such contempt, the entire event could not continue. For the American Quaker Alice Paul, this was an unthinkable travesty. It was unlike anything she had ever seen or heard. A young lovely, well-dressed woman with a message of self-worth and justice was being swallowed up in a torrent of mad vulgar yelling rudeness that was so inescapable, the event ended with Christabel unheard.
That night Alice wrote in her daily notes that she was shocked and disgusted. It turned out to be Alice’s defining moment. The fire was lit. This Prophetic Encounter, which was just beginning, was her road to Damascus, her Satori, her Enlightenment. Alice’s soul was revealed to herself, potential awakened. Drafted into a lifelong and, mostly, solitary leadership, Alice Paul was converted, “heart and soul.”
Christabel’s speech was rescheduled and fully heard. Alice was forced to reorganize her life’s priorities. It was a long way from tennis and biology. It was not polite, silent listening for the internal witness to arise. It was not a triviality or a temporary meal for a lifetime of starving poor. It was meaning. It was purpose. It was the soul speaking loudly in the form of a woman who wanted, demanded to be heard.
Keeping the summer plans intact, Alice spent the season bicycling in Europe. When she returned to London the British suffrage movement was bursting. Alice joined in the two scheduled suffrage parades and rallies. June 13th, thousands of women marched including a U.S. group led by Anna Howard Shaw. Dressed in white, pushing carriages, demanding attention and widening their influence, they marched through London to collect at Royal Albert Hall. June 21st, seven separate parades converged into one massive rally in Hyde Park of 30,000 (many reports of more) suffragettes in white, green and purple. Alice marched in Christabel’s contingent, leading with a banner, “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” It was so spectacular and strategic, it was written about all over the world. The New York Times reported it in detail.
Alice’s notes were now about women speaking in the public square, the impact of pageantry and garnering media attention. She was witnessing the personal transformation of unrealized and housebound women into heartfelt activists working on liberation through camaraderie and asserting their voices. She saw, as all activists do, the activist is activated by doing something bold never to return to faintheartedness again. It was the same realization Gandhi would offer the women of India twenty years later, inviting them to protest in the public square knowing that such an action would create a permanent awakening.
Alice rented a little place at 31 Red Lion Street, London. It was two unfurnished rooms and her first home. Alive with purpose, she went to all the suffrage meetings she could, and began studying with the most militant. As was the practice, the “newbies,” were sent to street corners to hawk the Women’s Social and Political Union’s paper, Votes For Women. (WSPU) Like dozens of other burgeoning activists, Alice was finding her public voice.
Christabel’s mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, the resolute, vocal, daring and brave suffrage commander was nothing like the cautious, mannerly, thoughtful, Tacie Paul, Alice’s mother. Mrs. Paul was concerned with the newspaper reports of arrests and violence in the British suffrage movement. She wrote Alice often about coming home, sending a hundred dollars, here and there, for glasses, clothes and dental work. After several scholarship applications failed and money spats escalated with her mother, it appeared that Alice would have no choice but to leave Britain.
Just as plans were developing to set sail for the U.S., Christabel asked Alice to partake in an arrestible protest directed at Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. It was an activist’s iconic call to be brave, to step beyond expectation, to break all boundaries both social and internal, It was delivered by the irresistible patron of her awakening. Alice could not refuse. Quaker resolve meets Pankhurst action. A lightning bolt of an encounter.
She had to say yes. She had to practice the militancy she was growing to understand and admire. She wrote her mother that she would not be coming home. Instead she collected her nerves, wrote yes in a note to the WSPU, paced around the post box for hours and, finally, dropped it in. Any activist who has said yes in advance of a daring public action can easily understand this rush of fear and second guessing. All the while it is the soul insisting that this is a vocation that cannot be ignored. As Doris Stevens said, “You may delay it. You cannot stop it. We want to accelerate it.”
Alice was directed to attend the preparation meeting, led by Sylvia Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. The women were given explicit directions. They were told what to wear, what to do and to expect to be arrested. June 29, 1909, with Mrs. Pankhurst at the lead, they marched twelve across to the St. Stephens entrance to Parliament demanding to see the Prime Minister. With clubs and fists, the police turned them away line by line. Dressed in triple thick clothes, the protesters stepped up volunteering to receive the violent blows. It is the same technique Gandhi and King would use decades later to demonstrate that justice will not be turned away, even in the face of personal harm. With slingshots, some of the women pelted stones with petitions attached at Parliament windows. Arrests began, Alice among them. She was taken to the police station where her third Prophetic Encounter awaited her.
That night one hundred women and a few men were arrested for confronting the Prime Minister for their Right to Petition. They were taken to the London police precinct that served the Parliament district. Standing in the midst of it all, Alice described the scene; ladies and police, hats and batons, gavels and all manners of processing churning around her. In the visible distance was the officers’ recreation area. Apart from the bedlam, leaning on the billiard table was a tall, red-haired, stately woman with an American flag pin on her lapel ~ Miss Lucy Burns, Catholic from Brooklyn, Vassar class of 1902. She was all that Alice was not. While Alice was self-contained, refined and studied; Lucy was outgoing, theatrical and attractive. The party came to Lucy as Alice would be seated in a straight back chair on the sidelines. Both braver than any others, deeply committed to equality, a magnificent pair. Impossible to know at the time, as is always the case. Thunder found lightening. Light found Day.
Daughters of bankers who believed in their daughters. Religious homes; Quaker and Catholic carried the lessons of their faith throughout their lives. Alice questioning and, finally, repelled by the violence. Lucy took the opposite tack, slapping a police chief inspector’s face, tossing his cap to the floor and throwing ink bottles through windows. The banner for suffrage they mutually embraced was large enough to cover England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States.
Traveling through the Kingdom, Lucy and Alice heckled all the best, including a young new politician, Winston Churchill. Most famous of their conquests, November 9, 1909, a banquet given by the Lord Mayor in Guildhall. Oddly symbolic of their personalities, Alice dressed as a char woman and Lucy in an evening gown set off to heckle and demand votes for women. Lucy got close enough to Churchill to say right to his face, “How can you dine here while women are starving in prison?” referring to those who were on hunger strikes. Amelia Brown, who was with Alice, threw her shoe and broke a window as they both shouted, “Votes for Women!”
Alice was arrested and sentenced to a month of hard labor in Holloway prison. The WSPU women refused to wear prison clothes or to eat. Suffrage hunger strikers were now being brutally force-fed. If they refused to open their mouths, the hose was plunged down their nostrils. Famously, Alice had a particularly painful and difficult time, her cries heard throughout the prison. She fought back to the point where the nurses tied her torso to the chair with sheets as the doctor carelessly jammed the metal tube into her nose. This torture happened to Alice a record fifty-five times. In a letter to her mother, Alice wrote it is, “simply a policy of passive resistance and, as a Quaker, thee ought to approve of that.”
After three years abroad and only twenty-five years old Alice Paul returned to her family a trained and veteran suffragette, an experienced prisoner and a woman who found her passion. She was a strategist with purpose who would not be deterred. January 20, 1910, it might have looked like a fine young lady was walking down the gangplank in Philadelphia but militancy had never been so deftly understood by one so perfectly timed.
1911, Alice and Lucy reunited in America. Women had just won the vote in Washington state. The vision for national voting rights was on the horizon. It was time to wake up the sleepy moderates of Mrs. Anna Howard Shaw’s National American Woman Suffrage Association. Alice was about to launch her brand of suffrage and Lucy agreed to help her for “a week.” Of course Lucy would be the match-head for Alice’s flint-strike for nine years. Pageant master would meet map-maker and all those who opposed Votes for Women would have the choice to acquiesce or extinguish in a golden hot flame.
When searching through the life of Miss Alice Paul for Prophetic Encounters, one might ask, why not Gandhi, why not Mrs. Pankhurst, why not Alva Belmont? Because this is not about fame or fortune. It is about an indelible ignition that fuels an unrelenting passion. It is about a singular ignition that lights again and again. It is about looking into the face of one who also carries such a soul force. In fact, it may not even be a shared mission, such as Gandhi meeting Margaret Sanger, both holding grave differences. It is about an activist’s heart which can only be perceived by another activist.
Within that heart-to-heart, there is a melancholy of never finishing, a knowing that nothing less will do and a brief satisfaction of being understood. There is a joy that occurs at the point of this encounter. It is a flash when looking into their eyes. You see them. You may see a bit of yourself but the best part, the immeasurable part, is at last you are seen.
Robert Clarkson Brooks, Christabel Pankhurst and Lucy Burns met a certain bar. They struck a chord within Miss Paul which made it clear life would never be the same. Beyond the moment, larger than imagined, there was a quickening, a profound transformative meeting. As Alice described after hearing Christabel only once, Alice was now a “heart and soul convert.” It was a conversion that lasted all of her life, to her last breath at age ninety-two.
As an activist, you can wonder about a Prophetic Encounter on your path but the knowing is only available in retrospect. Hold you lamp high for all to see. As the Quaker motto states, Mind the Light.
1. McKanan, Dan. Prophetic Encounters, Religion and the American Radical Tradition. 2011, Beacon Press.
