Journal of Women's History

One hallmark of recent feminist biography has been its focus on the interplay between the personal and the political in constructing the narratives of individual women’s lives. The case of Alice Paul suggests that not all subjects are amenable to such an approach. Paul so defined her life by devotion to the cause of feminism, first woman suffrage and then decades of advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, that she had no personal life to speak of. When the personal is so completely subsumed to the political, it poses a huge hurdle for the feminist biographer.