American activist Alice Paul was BOTD in 1885. Born in Mount Laurel, New Jersey to a Quaker family with a history of social activism, she studied at Swarthmore College. She moved to England to study at the London School of Economics, where she joined the women’s suffrage movement, learning the tactics of civil disobedience from Emmeline Pankhurst. Paul and fellow American Lucy Burns became committed campaigners, arrested multiple times, leading hunger strikes in prison and repeatedly subjected to assault and force-feeding. Her experiences in prison were widely publicised, and on her return to the United States in 1910, she quickly became a public figure. Paul and Burns argued for a Constitutional amendment to guarantee votes for women, clashing with the more genteel campaigns of American suffragist leader Jane Addams. In 1913, Paul organised the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, the day before President Wilson’s inauguration, attracting significant press attention, but angering Addams who considered her moves too aggressive. In 1916, Paul and Burns formed the National Woman’s Party, organising a non-violent civil disobedience campaign known as the Silent Sentinels. Arrested and imprisoned in 1917, Paul and her colleagues endured horrific conditions, repeated force-feeding and violent assault from prison guards. After suffrage was achieved in 1920, Paul shifted her attention to an Equal Rights Amendment to secure women equality, finally achieving a prohibition on sex discrimination in the 1964 Equal Rights Act. Paul never married or had children, claiming to have devoted her life to social activism. Many of her close friends in the suffragist movement were lesbian, and biographers have speculated that she and Burns may have been lovers. She died in 1977, aged 92. She was played by Hilary Swank (as a heterosexual) in the television film Iron-Jawed Angels.