Date
12-16-2025
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Mary Elizabeth Barclay
Keywords
Alice Paul, Women's Suffrage, Quaker
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Alvarado, Alice L., "“Forward into Light”: The Shaping of the Suffrage Ideology of Alice Paul and the Practical Theological Application of the Quaker SPICES in the American Women’s Suffrage Movement" (2025). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 7788.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/7788
Abstract
In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution gave women the right to vote after decades of dedication and agitation by women in their monumental fight to win the franchise. Alice Paul, a second-generation suffragist, dedicated her life to the cause and became the new face of the suffrage movement in Progressive America. A birthright Hicksite Quaker, Alice Paul’s ancestry can be traced back to the Quakers of England, and her extended family connected with early practitioners such as George Fox, along with a blood relation to William Penn. Paul’s Quaker ancestry, Quaker upbringing, Quaker guarded education, and her tribulations in England shaped her personal and suffrage ideology. On return from England in 1910, Alice Paul left institutionalized Quakerism, but lived her faith through the practical application of the Quaker belief system in which she was reared. Paul utilized the “SPICES” of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship to successfully shape the American Women’s suffrage movement between 1910 and 1920.
