This Town Wouldn't Be the Same without These Quaker Women

By Sandy Robson on 05/27/2011 @ 06:00 PM

Tags: Around the Office, Lobbying, Quakers

FCNL Executive Secretary Diane Randall with a statue of Alice Paul.

“It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun. There is hardly a field, economic or political, in which the natural and unaccustomed policy is not to ignore women…Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically.”

Alice Paul, 1920

Last Thursday I went with FCNL Executive Secretary Diane Randall to an opening of the newly-renovated Sewall-Belmont House & Museum, just a few doors down from FCNL, where Quaker women’s suffrage activist Alice Paul ran the National Women’s Party headquarters a century ago. I’ve spent a good deal of time working in and talking about Quaker social justice, but this museum reminded me that my own life might be quite different if it weren’t for the struggle of Quakers {and many others) for women’s rights!

A Quaker from New Jersey, Alice Paul attended Swarthmore College before working with the British suffrage movement. Inspired by their campaign tactics, Paul returned to the United States to found the National Women's Party in 1913. Paul was a radical organizer, drawing thousands of women to march down Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Petitions, rallies, lobby visits, picketing and election campaigns swept across the country. It was no easy road, though, as many women’s suffragists were jailed, force-fed during hunger strikes, and ignored by the press. After a year of picketing the White House, Woodrow Wilson expressed support for women’s suffrage, and the amendment was signed into law in 1920.

From left: Elizabeth Crum, Sewall Belmont House Public Programs & Outreach manager, Page Harrington- Executive Director of SBHM, Diane Randall, Executive Secretary of FCNL, and Sandy Robson, Campaigns Program Assistant at FCNL.

As the Sewell-Belmont House puts it, “Quakers believe in absolute equality and dedication to a divinely inspired ‘concern.’ For an earlier generation it was abolition. For Paul, it was suffrage.” In 1848 Quaker women like Lucretia Mott helped to convene the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. After the Civil War, activists including Susan B. Anthony (another Quaker) advocated for women to be given the right to vote under the 14th Amendment. It seems fitting that Diane, a fellow Friend and the first woman to serve as the Executive Secretary of FCNL, was present at the Sewall-Belmont House’s re-opening to celebrate this legacy 163 years after the Seneca Falls Convention. It’s been a long road, but how far we’ve come.

Alice Paul picketing outside of the White House.

And how far we still have to go.

The museum also calls attention to the “unfinished business” of the movement for women’s equality. In 2009 women earned about 75% of what their male counterparts were paid, according to a White House report released in March. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men, and the economic inequities for women of color are even greater. As a Quaker woman, it’s daunting to contemplate the “unfinished business”—where do we begin? Fortunately the Sewall-Belmont House offers the opportunity to be inspired by the victories of the past.

The Freedom Machine

Ladies bicycle soiree, circa 1900. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

"I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."

Susan B. Anthony, 1896

Bloomers were met with resistance.

In the 1890’s, the advent of the modern bicycle brought unprecedented freedom of movement to women. As they were able to travel independently, they could explore new communities, meet new people—and begin to organize themselves. Cycling opened the door for women to become more athletic and to challenge the corsets and long, flowing dresses of the era. Women started to wear “bloomers”—pants that looked like skirts but allowed women to straddle a bike without showing the world their petticoats. (The pants were named for their creator, women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer.)

Yours truly at Tioga Pass in Yosemite after bicycling from Florida in the spring of 2009.

As the women’s bicycle craze caught on, it was met with surprising resistance. Doctors claimed that cycling was dangerous for the delicate female form, and others claimed that it compromised women’s femininity. In 1895, a group of men signed a pledge promising not to associate with any woman who wore bloomers, aiming to build a “national anti-bloomer brigade.”

These days seems that there are quite a few of us female Quaker bicyclists. In fact several of us gals ride to FCNL on bikes almost every day. We owe it to our forebearers!