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The National Woman's Party (NWP) was an American women's organization formed in 1916 as an outgrowth of the ''Congressional Union'', which in turn was formed in 1913 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to fight for women's suffrage, ignoring all other issues. It broke from the much larger National American Woman Suffrage Association, which was nationwide, and worked chiefly in Washington. The NWP prioritized the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage. The National Woman's Party, like the Congressional Union, was tightly controlled by Paul, who learned from the even more militant suffragettes in Britain who used violence to gain publicity and force passage of suffrage. The strategy was to use publicity to ridicule and damage the Democratic Party and President Woodrow Wilson, to shame them into supporting suffrage. Starting in January 1917, NWP members known as Silent Sentinels protested outside the White House. While the British suffragettes stopped their protests when Britain entered the war in 1914, and supported the British war effort, Paul continued her campaign after the US entered the war on April 6, 1917. The protesters argued that it was hypocritical for the US to fight a war for democracy in Europe, while denying its benefits to half of the US population. Similar arguments were being made in Europe, where most of the allied nations of Europe had enfranchised women or would soon.〔 The protests were then widely criticized for ignoring the World War and attracting radical anti-war elements.〔Nancy F. Cott, ''The Grounding of Modern Feminism'' (1989) pp 51–82〕 Protesters later chained themselves to the White House fence in order to get arrested, then went on hunger strikes to gain publicity. Abusive treatment of the protesters, who called themselves political prisoners, angered some Americans and created more support for the suffrage amendment. They were released and their arrests were later declared unconstitutional. In the meantime, NAWSA helped pass the 1917 referendum in New York State in favor of suffrage. In early 1918, Wilson came out in favor of the amendment, and it passed the House, but failed in the Senate despite another round of protests and arrests. After the NWP helped replace anti-suffrage senators in the 1918 elections, the amendment finally passed both houses and was sent to the states for ratification. The Nineteenth amendment was ratified by enough states by 1920, thus giving women the vote. After ratification, the NWP turned its attention to passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Historian Nancy Cott says that as the party moved into the 1920s: : it remained an autocratically run, single-minded and single-issue pressure group, still reliant on getting into the newspapers as a means of publicizing its cause, very insistent on the method of "getting in touch with the key men."...NWP lobbyists went straight to legislators, governors, and presidents, not to their constituents.〔Nancy Cott, ''The Grounding of Modern Feminism'' (1987) p 80〕 == Early history == After their baptism into militant suffrage work in Great Britain, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns reunited in the United States in 1910. The two women originally were appointed to the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In March 1913, the two women organized a parade of 5,000–8,000 women (by differing estimates) in Washington, D.C. on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Though beautifully planned as an elegant progression of symbolically dressed, accomplished, and professional women, the parade quickly devolved into riot. The D.C. police did little to help them; the women were assisted by the Massachusetts National Guard, the Pennsylvania National Guard, and boys from the Maryland Agricultural College, who created a human barrier protecting the women from the angry crowd.〔Baltimore Sun, March 4, 1913〕 After this incident, which Paul used to rally public opinion to the women's cause, Paul and Burns founded the Congressional Union in April 1913, which split off from the National later that year. The Congressional Union began publishing a weekly newspaper, ''The Suffragist'', in November 1913. Paul and Burns were mostly frustrated with the National's approach of focusing on individual state referendums; while they were pursuing the congressional amendment, that was not the focus of their work. Alice Paul had also chafed under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, as she had very different ideas of how to go about suffrage work, and a different attitude towards militancy. The split was confirmed by a major difference of opinion on the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment. This amendment was spearheaded by Alice Paul's replacement as chair of the National's Congressional Committee, and was a compromise of sorts meant to appease the racist South. Shafroth–Palmer was to be a constitutional amendment that would require any state with more than 8 percent signing an initiative petition to hold a state referendum on suffrage. This would have kept the law-making out of federal hands, a proposition more attractive to the South. Southern states feared a congressional women's suffrage amendment as a possible federal encroachment into their restrictive system of voting laws, meant to disenfranchise the black voter. Paul and Burns felt that this amendment was a lethal distraction from the true and ultimately necessary goal of an all-encompassing federal amendment protecting the rights of all women—especially as the bruising rounds of state referendums were perceived at the time as almost damaging the cause. In Paul's words: "It is a little difficult to treat with seriousness an equivocating, evasive, childish substitute for the simple and dignified suffrage amendment now before Congress." File:Alice Paul 155017u original.jpg|Portrait of Alice Paul, 1915 File:Lucy Burns 1913.jpg|Lucy Burns, Vice Chairman Congressional Union, 1913 File:Dorr-Rheta-Childe-1913.jpg|Rheta Childe Dorr, first editor of ''The Suffragist'' 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「National Woman's Party」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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