This multi-media stage presentation features Alice Paul Scholar, Zoe Nicholson.
With a backdrop of hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings, Zoe tells
the story of the great teacher of Nonviolent Direct Action and the incendiary thread
of tea in the American Women’s Revolution; Seneca Falls: 1848 to Washington
DC 2018.
Alice was an astounding woman whose influence and life was almost entirely
redacted into obscurity by jealous and disapproving moderates. This small Quaker
woman carried a fire for Equality that could not be extinguished – no matter the
defeats, the rise and fall of public opinion or her declining age. Alice never rested
from the sustained campaign for the 19th Amendment to 54 more years writing and advocating for the
Equal Rights Amendment.
Publicly fasting on water for 37 days for the ERA, Summer, 1982, Zoe had no idea that the author of the
ERA and founder of American NVDA, Alice Paul was going to be the North Star for the rest of Zoe’s
life. With each revelation, each phone interview, a rich bibliography, hundreds of hours scouring
newspapers and fantastic contacts through online ancestry apps, the puzzle pieces came into focus. Zoe
asks how different would activism be if the principal methods for social change, now credited to Martin
Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi were rightfully attributed to Miss Paul.
• Opens at the Grated Door, Alice’s Tearoom, 14 Jackson Place, DC, 1918
• The spectacle of Hats and Tea
• Zoe is called to the ERA, public fast and a life documenting NVDA
• Miss Alice Paul, 92 years of Fierce. indefatigable, genius, UK – USA – ERA – penniless
• NVDA today – Miss Paul’s lost legacy
• Radical Activism – a life worth living – with a cup of tea