Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Tom MacArthur hold discussion with Alice Paul Institute’s Girls Advisory Council
It was Mt. Laurel native Alice Paul who led suffragists in the 1910s in the campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution to give women the right to vote.
Now, nearly a century later, perhaps it’s only fitting that the Girls Advisory Council at the Alice Paul Institute in Mt. Laurel got a visit from some elected officials when Sen. Cory Booker (D- NJ) and Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-3rd Dist.) stopped by for a roundtable discussion on Aug. 10.
Kris Myers, director of programs at The Alice Paul Institute, described the Girls Advisory Council as a group of teenage girls who meet at the institute throughout the year to discuss and advocate women’s rights issues, as well as network and participate in conferences and workshops.
Myers led Booker and MacArthur on a quick tour of the institute, located at Paul’s birthplace and childhood home of Paulsdale, before the two officials sat down for a discussion with the girls.
To start the conversation, Booker and MacArthur went around the table and asked the members of the advisory council to talk about themselves and their experiences with the institute.
One council member, Natalie LaRosa, said she had only joined the advisory council this past year after some past council members spoke to her about women’s rights issues and said it seemed like LaRosa was a feminist.
Listening to the tone of LaRosa’s voice when she said the word feminist, Booker asked her if the word held a stigma for her before she joined the advisory council.
“It kind of had negative connotations just because going to school guys and even other girls were like, ‘oh, you’re a feminist type of girl,’ you know what I mean? They don’t really understand what it’s all about,” LaRosa said.
When Booker asked her how she would explain feminism to others, she told him it’s just about equal rights.
“If you believe men, women, everyone basically is the same, you’re a feminist,” LaRosa said. “Then people are like ‘oh, I guess I am, too.’”
Lea Hawthorne, another member who joined the Girls Advisory Council this past year, told Booker and MacArthur that a friend on the council had previously told her about the life and work of Alice Paul before she joined. Yet it wasn’t until Hawthorne discovered there was just one slide about Paul in her high school history class that she decided to join the council and learn more.
“It’s really been a life-changing choice for me … I found that I was passionate about women’s equality and women’s rights,” Hawthorne said.
Passion seemed to be one of the themes of the discussion among Booker, MacArthur and the girls, as the two officials noted Paul’s passion in her fight for the vote.
MacArthur recalled reading a letter during his tour in which Paul described being force-fed during her famous protest hunger strike.
“How does somebody do that regularly, allow themselves to be arrested nine times and go through the risk and uncertainty of how you’re going to be treated when you’re in the back of a jail? She did it and they did because they believed it was right and wrong and they were fighting on the side of the angels,” MacArthur said.
Booker echoed that sentiment when he was asked about how he would advise others to best enact change, and he paraphrased President Barack Obama’s recent commencement speech at Howard University where Obama told students to engage themselves in the political process.
Earlier in the discussion, Booker had commended the Alice Paul Institute’s Girls Advisory Council for carrying on the legacy of Alice Paul by doing just that.
“Part of the thing that speaks to me is how you are all are raising the consciousness of others, because most of us are very comfortable where we are, and we don’t think about the injustice in the world until people … call to our consciences,” Booker said.
Booker is a co-sponsor in the U.S. Senate of the Alice Paul Congressional Gold Medal Act that would posthumously award Alice Paul with the Congressional Medal of Honor. MacArthur introduced the latest version of that act in U.S. House of Representatives.
