Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument

Alva Belmont

Angelina Emily Grimké (Weld)

Anita Pollitzer

Crystal Eastman

Dr. Alice Paul

Inez Milholland

Iris Calderhead Pratt

Lucy Burns

Today's visitors know the Georgia-style home on Capitol Hill as the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. The National Woman's Party knew it as a symbol of their proximity to political power and their perseverance as an organization. The NWP spent 40 years fighting Congress to keep their headquarters. As fierce protectors of the Belmont House, the NWP carried on a tradition of women as historic preservationists.

When Carrie Lane Chapman Catt was 13-years-old and living in rural Charles City, Iowa, she witnessed something that would help to decide the course of her life. Her family was politically active and on Election Day in 1872, Carrie’s father and some of the male hired help were getting ready to head into town to vote. She asked her mother why she wasn’t getting dressed to go too. Her parents laughingly explained to their daughter that women couldn’t vote.

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The Woman Suffrage Procession along Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's presidential inauguration, used pageantry to raise awareness about women's exclusion from the nation's political process. The publicity following the event re-energized the woman suffrage movement in the United States.

During my lifetime Black people were deeply entrenched in the struggle for voting rights. As a child of the 1960s I heard a constant emphasis on how important it was to vote. To make our voices heard. I went with my parents to polling places when they voted, where I was surrounded by adults who grew up in the Jim Crow South and knew that voting was not something to take for granted. Michelle Duster is the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells.

Prior to the 1830s, American antislavery organizations were formed and controlled by white men. This changed in December of 1833 when African American men were invited to participate at the first convention of the American Anti-Slavery Slavery Society (AASS) held in Philadelphia. Some women were also invited to the convention, but as spectators rather than as members. Excluding women from full participation was customary of the period’s social conventions.

Some abolitionist women found the confidence needed to reject social conventions and participate in public activities by denying the authority of clerical rules. Abolitionist feminists also found resolve to contradict gender roles in the abolitionist belief of the common humanity of all people. The belief in common humanity was used by abolitionists to argue for the definition of African American slaves as people, not property.

The abolition movement helped form and influence those who built and led the women’s rights movement. The beliefs and practices of the abolition movement provided a backdrop against which antislavery women could challenge gender roles and leave the woman’s sphere to enter the public sphere.