The National Woman's Party (NWP) was a women's organization founded by Alice Paul 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. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman 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 originally under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913; by 1917, the name had been changed to the National Women's Party. After the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920, the NWP turned its attention to passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Congress passed such an Amendment and most states ratified it, but at the last minute in 1982 it was stopped by a coalition of conservatives led by Phyllis Schlafly and ERA never passed. However the NWP in 1964 did succeed, with the support of conservatives and over the opposition of liberals, blacks and labor unions, to have "sex" added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thus achieving most of the goals sought by the NWP.
Read more about National Woman's Party: Militant Suffragists, Fighting For Equal Rights, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words national, woman and/or party:
“The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“There was an old woman and she lived in a shoe,
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And she borrowed a beetle, and she knocked ‘em all on the head.
Then out went the old woman to bespeak ‘em a coffin
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“The newspaper reader says: this party is destroying itself through such mistakes. My higher politics says: a party that makes such mistakes is finished—it has lost its instinctive sureness.”
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