‘Does anyone know Alice Paul?’

Alice Paul is not a household name in America.

Artistic director and actor Rachael McClinton, who co-founded the Seattle-based Living Voices Theater, wants to change that.

This week McClinton brought “Hear My Voice” — a dynamic solo performance combined with archival film and sound produced by her husband Michael McClinton — to high schools and community centers throughout the Inland Northwest.

Written by Rachel Atkins, “Hear My Voice” takes place in Washington, D.C., in the early 1900s. McClinton stepped onto the stage as Jessie Barclay, the daughter of an important political journalist. Despite her parents’ disapproval, Barclay soon became deeply involved with the women’s suffrage movement and specifically the National Woman’s Party led by Alice Paul.

A social reformer, lawyer, and political strategist, Alice Paul devoted her life to securing equality for women. She founded the Congressional Union in 1913 to lobby for a constitutional amendment for suffrage.

In period costume with minimal props, McClinton enthusiastically pulled her audience into the everyday realities women experienced without a legal voice. Behind her a film moved in sync with her dialogue, filling the auditorium with the sound of horses trotting on cobblestone, women stirring milk into their tea, speeches being read from street corners, and letters from soldiers read aloud.

“It means a lot to use my passion — which is theater, my background is as an actor — to hopefully use theater to make people care about the story, to care about the women whose names aren’t known,” McClinton said. “Because people know Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and their non-violent political movements but does anyone know Alice Paul?”

“Hear My Voice” celebrated the culmination of the suffrage movement on Aug. 18, 1920, with the ratification of the 19th constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.

Through a grant specific to student engagement, Coeur d’Alene’s Human Rights Education Institute brought “Hear My Voice” to more than 1,000 students and several hundred community members in Kootenai County this week.

“It is important that we teach and remember the struggles of the past,” said Jeanette Laster, executive director of HREI.

McClinton performed for students at Lake City High School on Friday.

Sophomore Scarlet Harris said she was traumatized by the story of the suffragettes being force fed in prison to break their hunger strike. Several students articulated how emotive history presented in this fashion was, it pulled on their hearts.

“I don’t like how long it took for women to get the right to vote,” said Jacob Hutchinson, Lake City junior.

“I took away that there was a lot of effort that had to be put into it,” Harris said. “I don’t think it should have required that much effort or had that many traumatizing events that went along with it. But I’m thankful that we have the right to vote now.”

The students said they plan to vote when they turn 18, which for Hutchinson, unfortunately, is just a few days after the 2020 election.

“I think it’s really empowering to watch that [performance],” Zoe O’Brien, a senior who sits on the HREI board, said, turning to her friend Seerit Kaur, a senior.

Kaur and O’Brien run the Human Rights Club at Lake City High School.

“It was really moving and really powerful and I think it got a really great message across to all the students who came,” Kaur said.

But time keeps marching on and McClinton stressed that the story for equality does not stop with the right to vote. After the ratification of the 19th amendment, Paul realized the vote did not bring women legal equality. She wrote the Equal Rights Amendment and introduced it to Congress in 1923.

The ERA is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex.

At a community performance of the play on Thursday at the Jacklin Arts and Cultural Center, a woman asked McClinton why she’d never heard about the ERA.

“Young women, particularly teenage women watching this program are angry that they haven’t been taught this before,” McClinton said. “That they never heard of the ERA, had no idea that it was in the news now, so it’s more a righteous anger of awakening, which I like. As opposed to passivity there’s a sense of a spark.”

It took Congress almost 50 years to pass the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972. By 1977, the legislatures of 35 states had approved the amendment. On March 22, 2017, Nevada became the 36th state to ratify it. On May 30, 2018, Illinois became the 37th state. Only one state is needed to amend the Constitution to include the ERA. Five states, including Idaho, voted to rescind their ratification of the ERA,

Today — Sunday, March 8 — marks International Women’s Day. The Human Rights Education Institute celebrated the day on Friday morning, hosting a performance of “Hear My Voice.”

“That was a one-woman passion show,” said Donna Mills, a holistic health practitioner in Coeur d’Alene. “I’m stunned by the content.”

“History is so important, but there are millions of people not voting,” said Jessica Mahuron, a board member of the Kootenai County League of Women Voters. “It’s not just apathy, but institutions facilitating disengagement. We have to look closer at the problems today.”

International Women’s Day asks the global community how to forge a gender equal world and calls for people everywhere to celebrate women’s achievement, raise awareness against bias, and take action for equality.

Back at the Lake City auditorium, students were abuzz as they dispersed to their classrooms. O’Brien and Kaur paused to thank several women in their lives: Suzanne Marshall, Jeanette Laster, and Lake City High School English teacher Kirsten Pomerantz for the strength they bring to the Coeur d’Alene community.

“They are these really strong women who aren’t afraid to express their vision and to grow a community that is strong,” O’Brien said.

McClinton, standing on the stage in suffragette white, thanked Alice Paul with a hearty smile.

“Considering people don’t know she wrote the ERA, that she was the leader of [the suffrage] movement,” McClinton said. “People don’t wonder who Martin Luther King Jr. was, I want them to know who Alice Paul was.”