Crystal Eastman

“ Alice Paul is a leader of action, not of thought. She is a general, a supreme tactician, not an abstract thinker. Her joy is in the fight itself, in each specific drawn battle, not in debating with five hundred delegates the fundamental nature of the fight. "The Executive Committee have provided a good enough phrase–'To remove all the remaining forms of the subjection of women.' Let the delegates with the least possible debate adopt this phrase to serve for purpose, program and constitution." ”

“ To all such complaints graduates of the Alice Paul school had one dogmatic reply: "Never endorse anything that your organization isn't ready to fight for. Never protest about anything unless your organization is ready to make that protest good." ”

“ The only thing that makes a convention exciting or worth while is the debate over resolutions and program. But in Alice Paul's convention there were no resolutions and hardly any program! No resolution on disarmament was passed to give expression to the overwhelming pacifist sentiment of the Convention. No resolution of protest against the disfranchisement of Negro women was passed, although the Convention was almost unanimous in its indignation on that subject. ”

“ Five hours fo'r that discussion-hardly time enough to determine the future of a high school dramatic society!
Nothing is more fun than to speculate about the motives and intentions of a shrewd and able leader who keeps his own counsels. I give my speculation for what it is worth: Alice Paul was not really interested in the convention, she was interested in celebrating the victory. After all, despite reports to the contrary, she is a human being. ”

“ So to remake the marriage laws and so to modify public opinion that the status of the woman whose chosen work is home-making shall no longer be that of the dependent entitled to her board and keep in return for her services, but that of a full partner. ”

“ If some such program could have been exhaustively discussed at that convention we might be congratulating our selves that the feminist movement had begun in America. As it is all we can say is that the suffrage movement is ended.
* * * Is Alice Paul a radical? Is she even a liberal? Is she really a reactionary? These vague reformist terms are inappropriate in describing Alice Paul. Let us use the definite terms of the revolution. She is not a communist, she is not a socialist; if she is class-conscious at all her instincts are probably with the class into which she was born. ”

“ It must extend to the farthest bounds of the principle of the consent of the governed.' Do you think that women who thought in those terms would sit, idle today because political democracy has become an accomplished fact in this nation? ”