They turned out to be wrong about the second thing, but they were completely right about the first. They thought that women’s-rights advocates were trying to piggyback on the movement for rights for African-Americans, and that the load would kill the piggy. Their story is a classic case of what Hegel called “the cunning of reason”: the way apparently random or anomalous events later turn out to be pieces in a larger historical design.Īmong those who opposed the efforts of Paul, Smith, and Griffiths were the leaders of the civil-rights movement themselves.

What’s peculiar about their achievement-and this may have something to do with why fourth graders don’t learn about them, and why streets and schools all across the land are not named after them-is that it was accomplished in the face of the unequivocal opposition of the liberal establishment. They gave women the handle to the door to economic opportunity, and nearly all the gains women have made in that sphere since the nineteen-sixties were made because of what they did. But they played almost as big a role in the history of women’s rights as Marshall and King played in the history of civil rights for African-Americans. Not many Americans have even heard of Alice Paul, Howard W. Most Americans who made it past the fourth grade have a pretty good idea who Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were. McAvoy / Time Life Pictures / Getty Consolidated News Pictures / Getty Ed Clark / Time Life Pictures / Getty CBS via Getty

Photo Illustration (clockwise from top): Bettmann / Corbis Thomas D. Strange bedfellows behind the act: J.F.K., Martha Griffiths, Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard W.

Random Acts of Grace by Paul Johnson