There are two Alice Paul houses; both are National Historic Landmarks, and both are open to the public. That combination is rare enough to be worth stating at the top.
The first is Paulsdale, the New Jersey farmhouse where she was born in 1885 and grew up, now run by a non-profit dedicated to her legacy. The second is the house on Capitol Hill in Washington that served as the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party for nearly ninety years, where she lived and where she wrote the 1943 language of the Equal Rights Amendment. It is now the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, administered by the National Park Service.
This guide covers both and how to visit them.
The two houses at a glance
| Property | Location | Significance | Public access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paulsdale, built about 1840 | Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey | Her birthplace and childhood home; 6.5 acres | Open; run by the Alice Paul Institute |
| Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument | Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C. | Her home and the National Woman’s Party headquarters; where she drafted ERA language in 1943 | Open; National Park Service site with a museum |
Who was Alice Paul?
Alice Stokes Paul was an American suffragist and campaigner, born on 11 January 1885 into a Quaker family in New Jersey and educated at Swarthmore College. She spent time in England, where she joined the militant wing of the British suffrage movement, was imprisoned, and brought those tactics home.
She organised the 1913 suffrage procession in Washington, founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916, and was central to the campaign that produced the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. She then wrote the Equal Rights Amendment, first in 1923 and in revised language in 1943, and spent the rest of her life campaigning for it. She died in 1977.
Her Quaker upbringing matters to the story of the first house. Quaker communities in New Jersey held, in principle, that women and men were spiritual equals, and she grew up attending meetings where women spoke on the same terms as men. She said later that this was simply the world she assumed existed.
Paulsdale, her birthplace
Paulsdale was built around 1840 as a working farm, and it is where Alice Paul was born on 11 January 1885 and where she spent her childhood. The property today sits on 6.5 acres in Mount Laurel Township, in Burlington County, New Jersey.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 5 July 1989 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991, the highest level of federal recognition.
Unlike a great many landmark houses, it is not a private residence. It is owned and operated by the Alice Paul Institute, a non-profit founded to preserve the house and to run education and leadership programmes for women and girls, more recently presenting itself as the Alice Paul Center for Gender Justice. The building functions as both a historic house and a working organisation, which is an unusual and rather appropriate arrangement for a woman who spent her life organising.
Birthplaces of significant figures are frequently the hardest properties to save, because they are usually modest and rarely architecturally distinguished. The account of Nina Simone’s childhood home covers a similar rescue in North Carolina, and Helen Keller’s Ivy Green shows what a well-established birthplace site looks like once it is secure.
The Washington house
The second house has had several names: the Sewall House, the Alva Belmont House, and for many years the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum. It stands on Capitol Hill, close to the Senate side of the United States Capitol, which was the entire point of its location.
It served as the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party for almost ninety years, and Alice Paul lived there. Being able to walk to the Capitol was a strategic asset for an organisation whose method was relentless, sustained lobbying, and it is why the party bought there.
The work done in the building is extraordinary by any measure. Paul and the National Woman’s Party drafted more than 600 pieces of legislation there in support of equal rights, and it was in this house, in 1943, that Paul wrote the revised language of the Equal Rights Amendment that has been used ever since.
On 12 April 2016, President Barack Obama designated it the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. It is now administered by the National Park Service and includes a museum with one of the strongest collections on American women’s suffrage anywhere.
Visiting the Alice Paul houses
Both are open, and the arrangements differ.
Paulsdale, in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, is open to visitors Tuesday to Friday from noon until 4 pm, with guided tours offered on the second Saturday of each month from March to November, at noon and 1 pm. Because it is run by a small non-profit rather than a government agency, opening arrangements can change, and it is worth checking with the Alice Paul Institute before travelling.
The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington is a National Park Service site with a museum, and operates on federal opening arrangements. As with any NPS property, hours can be affected by staffing and by government funding, so the park’s own page is the place to check.
The two sites are roughly two and a half hours apart by road, which makes seeing both in a single trip entirely feasible.
Why both houses survive
It is worth noting how unusual this is. Most figures covered on this site have one preserved property at best, and often none. Paul has two, both federally recognised, both accessible.
The reason is that both buildings were saved by organisations rather than individuals. The Washington house was owned by the National Woman’s Party, an institution with a continuing interest in preserving it, which eventually handed it into federal care. Paulsdale was bought and restored by a non-profit formed specifically for the purpose. Neither depended on a private owner deciding to keep it, which is the usual and unreliable mechanism, as the demolitions documented elsewhere on this site repeatedly show.
Sources
- Wikipedia on Paulsdale’s construction around 1840, Paul’s birth there in 1885, and its National Register listing and National Historic Landmark designation.
- National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites and Visit NJ on the Alice Paul Institute, the site’s acreage and visiting arrangements.
- National Park Service on the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, its history and its museum.
- Federal Register for the April 2016 proclamation establishing the monument.
- National Park Service on the places associated with Alice Paul.
