Mr. President how long must women wait to get their liberty? Let

Hear the burning words of Alice Paul, fearless suffragist and warrior for justice, who cried out to the nation’s highest office: “Mr. President, how long must women wait to get their liberty? Let us have the rights we deserve.” These words are not gentle pleas but a demand forged in fire. They carry the weight of centuries in which women were bound in silence, denied the voice of citizenship, and left outside the gates of political power. It is the cry of half of humanity, insisting that freedom cannot be partial, that democracy without women is a house built on sand.

The origin of these words is found in the long and bitter struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States. Alice Paul, leader of the National Woman’s Party, organized protests, parades, and pickets before the White House in the 1910s. She and her fellow suffragists stood in the cold, day after day, holding banners that challenged President Woodrow Wilson directly. While the nation spoke of liberty abroad, fighting the First World War “to make the world safe for democracy,” Paul asked why liberty at home was denied to the women who sustained the very fabric of the nation. Her question—how long must women wait—was an indictment of hypocrisy, a reminder that freedom delayed is freedom denied.

Her cry echoes across history like a trumpet of justice. When women demanded the right to vote, they were mocked, beaten, and even imprisoned. Alice Paul herself was arrested and endured solitary confinement, hunger strikes, and force-feeding. Yet she did not bend. In her suffering, she revealed the cruelty of a system that preached liberty while denying it to millions of its own citizens. Her demand for the rights we deserve was not a request for privilege, but a call to recognize the humanity that had always been there.

Consider, O listener, the great turning point of 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified. After decades of struggle, sacrifice, and relentless pressure, women gained the constitutional right to vote. But victory did not come through patience or politeness alone; it came through voices like Alice Paul’s, fierce and unrelenting, who dared to confront power with courage. Her question—directed at the President himself—was a spark that lit the flame of final victory.

Yet her words live on because the struggle did not end with suffrage. Liberty is not a gift granted once and for all; it is a garden that must be tended. Women may have gained the vote, but the fight for equal opportunity, equal pay, and equal representation in government still continues. Alice Paul knew this well—after suffrage, she turned her energy to pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment, recognizing that the vote alone was not enough. Her cry for liberty still resounds, for full equality has not yet been realized.

O seeker, the lesson is clear: justice is never given freely by those who hold power; it must be demanded, again and again, with courage and with unity. Alice Paul teaches us that silence is complicity, that waiting too long for freedom is itself a form of oppression. The oppressed must speak, must march, must demand their place at the table of humanity, until their voices can no longer be ignored.

And what actions must we take? First, remember and honor the sacrifices of those who fought before us. Second, do not be lulled into thinking the work is complete. Stand against inequality wherever it appears—in the workplace, in politics, in culture. Teach the next generation that liberty belongs to all, not some. And above all, never grow weary of demanding the rights you deserve, for they are not gifts from rulers but inheritances of your very being.

Thus remember Alice Paul’s fiery challenge: “Mr. President, how long must women wait to get their liberty?” Let us answer her not with silence, nor with delay, but with action. Let every generation rise to claim the freedom that belongs to them, until no one is left waiting at the gates of liberty, and justice flows like a river for all.