OK to Issue Passports in a Woman’s Maiden Name
President Calvin Coolidge on this day endorsed Secretary of State Frank Kellogg’s decision to allow the State Department to issue passports to women in their maiden name if they preferred.
A year earlier, the State Department had ruled that a married woman’s passport had to be issued in her husband’s name.
Lobbying by the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, persuaded the State Department to reverse its policy. Alice Paul is most famous for two accomplishments. First, she organized militant picketing of the White House while Woodrow Wilson was president in an effort to get him to support the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote. The effort eventually succeeded and the Amendment was ratified in 1920, allowing women to vote in that November’s elections across the country. Second, she introduced her draft of the Equal Rights Amendment on July 21, 1923, setting the women’s rights movement on a new course. The ERA was never ratified, however.
Read Paul’s biography: Jill Zahniser and Amelia Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (2014)
And more: Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (2010)
Read Paul’s Oral History interview: http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6f59n89c/
Learn more: Christine A. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928 (1986)
Watch the Video, Who Was Alice Paul?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fctY7-1BqA