http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_paul_alice.htm
Alice Paul
January 11 <http://womenshistory.about.com/library/cal/bl0111.htm>, 1885 - July 9, 1977
Alice Paul is credited as one of the leading figures responsible for the passage of the 19th Amendment (woman suffrage) to the U.S. Constitution.
Paul was raised as a Quaker, attended Swarthmore College, and worked at the New York College Settlement while attending the New York School of Social Work. She left for England in 1906 to work in the settlement house movement there for three years. She studied at university in England, and returned to get her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1912). 
She was chair of a major committee (congressional) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association within a year, in her mid-twenties, but a year later (1913) she and others withdrew from the NAWSA to form the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. This organization evolved into the National Woman's Party in 1917, and Alice Paul's leadership was key to this organization's founding and future. 
In England, Paul had taken part in more radical protests for woman suffrage, including participating in the hunger strikes. She brought back this sense of militancy, and back in the U.S. she organized protests and rallies and ended up imprisoned three times. 
Her emphasis on a federal constitutional amendment for suffrage was at odds with the NAWSA position <blbio_catt_carrie_chapman.htm>, which was to work state-by-state as well as at the federal level. Despite the often strong acrimony between the two groups, it's probably fair to say (in retrospect) that the two groups' tactics complemented each other: the NAWSA's taking more deliberate action to win suffrage in elections meant that more politicians at the federal level had a stake in keeping women voters happy, and the NWP's militant stands kept the issue at the forefront of the political world. 
After the 1920 victory for the federal amendment, Paul became involved in the struggle to introduce and pass an Equal Rights Amendment. The Amendment was finally passed in Congress in 1970 and sent to the states to ratify; however, the number of states necessary never ratified within the specified time limit and the Amendment failed. 
Paul also was active in the Peace movement, stating at the outbreak of World War II that if women had helped to end World War I, the second war would not have been necessary. 
Paul died in 1977 in New Jersey, the heated battle for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) having brought her once more to the forefront of the American political scene.