The Death Of The United States - 933 Words

For staging hunger strikes, Paul and several other suffragists were forcibly fed in a tortuous manner. Prison officials relocated Paul to a sanitarium in hopes of getting her declared insane; during this time, while Paul was separated from the others, they had her evaluated to see if she was mentally ill. One of the psychologist, so eloquently, suggested that â€Å"insanity can be mistaken for courage.† Most of the doctors did not believe Paul to be insane, only depressed and hungry. When news of the prison conditions and hunger strikes became publicized, Americans began demanding the release of these women. This sympathy for the imprisoned women brought an enormous amount of support to the cause of women’s suffrage. After their release, the†¦show more content†¦In August of 1920, women gained the right to vote after a long and brutal seventy-two year battle. Growing up as a Quaker, Alice Paul always knew equality was a must. After fighting a long and hard battle to win the right to vote, she wanted to establish the Equality Rights Amendment. While many suffragists left activism after the 19th Amendment was enacted, Paul still thought more should be done. In 1923, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, where Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton originated the women’s suffrage movement, Paul announced she would be working toward a new constitutional amendment. This new amendment was to be called the â€Å"Lucretia Mott Amendment†, in honor of Mott’s hard work for civil rights. This amendment called for absolute equality stating, â€Å"Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction† (â€Å"Alice Paul: Women’s). Paul worked on this, and presented it in every Congress session, for over twenty-five years. During the 1940s, both of the political parties implanted the amendment in their campaigns to more effectively grab the public. In 1943, the ERA was rewritten and included the â€Å"Alice Paul Amendment.† The new amendment read, â€Å"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.† Alice