National Woman's Party
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The National Woman's Party (NWP), was a women's organization founded in 1913 that fought for women's rights during the early 20th century in the United States, particularly for the right to vote on the same terms as men and against employment discrimination. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Women Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states and from which the NWP split, the NWP put its priority on the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage.
Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the organization under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. The organization did not allow men to join it.
During the group's first meeting, Paul clarified that the party would not be a political party and therefore would not name a candidate for United States president during elections. While non-partisan, the NWP directed much of its fire at President Woodrow Wilson when criticizing those responsible for the social situation in which women of the era lived. The National Woman's Party also opposed World War I.
Women associated with the party became the first women to picket for women's rights in front of the White House; they also staged a suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson's inauguration, that was broken up by the police. Many of the NWP's members, upon arrest, went on hunger strikes; some, including Paul, were force-fed by jail personnel as a consequence. The resulting scandal and its negative impact on the country's international reputation at a time when Wilson was trying to build a reputation for himself and the nation as an international leader in human rights may have contributed to Wilson's decision to publicly call for Congress to pass the Suffrage Amendment.
After the ratification of the Nineteenth amendment in 1920, the NWP turned its attention to eliminating other forms of gender discrimination, principally by advocating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Paul drafted. The organization regrouped and began to publish a magazine entitled Equal Rights directed mostly towards women, but, as Paul would say, also meant to educate men about the benefits of women's suffrage, women's rights and other issues concerning American women.
Other suffragist groups had disagreed with the NWP's tactics before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment; "social feminists" such as Florence Kelley, Rose Schneiderman, and Jane Addams likewise disapproved of the individualistic, "equal rights feminism" of the National Woman's Party, favoring instead a broader reform agenda as part of the labor and progressive movements of the day. They were opposed in particular to the Equal Rights Amendment because it would have undone much of the protective legislation that gave favored treatment to women workers for which Schneiderman, Addams and activists of the Women's Trade Union League had campaigned. As the 1920s progressed, the NWP was eclipsed by other feminist groups and was defunct by 1930.
