Last updated: July 2, 2026
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Letha Mae and Alice: Caring for the Belmont House
By Dr. Caitlyn Jones, Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
A Tale of Two Women
National Woman's Party collection, Library of Congress
Letha Mae Glover first met Alice Paul in 1965 when she interviewed for a housekeeping job at the Belmont House, then the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Glover introduced herself to Paul, a famous women’s rights activist and co-founder of the NWP. “I’m Letha Mae Glover and somebody told me you might have some work for me to do.”
“How tall are you?” Paul asked immediately.
At the time, Glover thought it was an odd question. “It’s just one of those things that this woman thought was important,” she recalled later. “Maybe because she was short, too.” Glover told Paul that she stood four feet, eleven inches tall.
That’s how the unusual yet close relationship between Letha Mae Glover and Alice Paul began.
National Woman's Party Collect, Library of Congress
Though both women were short, each of them had a big personality. Alice Paul earned a reputation in her early years as a militant suffragist who staged dramatic protests and put her body on the line for women’s voting rights. Letha Mae Glover was militant in her own way, always demanding respect and decorum from her family and from strangers. Glover spent years working as the Belmont’s housekeeper and getting to know Paul, who lived there. Most of the time, the two women existed in harmony. Other times, they clashed loudly.
This story of an unlikely bond between two different yet strong-willed women is based on an oral history Glover recorded in 1994, seventeen years after Paul’s death. Seeing Alice Paul through the eyes of Letha Mae Glover gives us an inside perspective on an activist in the final years of her life. It also shows us how women outside of the NWP took pride in preserving its history and the Belmont House itself. As Glover put it, “There's three things that are important to me: my family, my faith, and enjoying the work here.”
Making a Home in the District
Letha Mae Glover and Alice Paul grew up worlds apart.
Paul was born in 1885 to a white Quaker family in New Jersey. Her father worked in finance and created a modest wealth for the family. Alice and her siblings grew up on a farm and took part in its upkeep, but the family also hired Irish immigrants to work in the home. Most importantly for Paul’s development, she grew up in a world where men and women were seen as equals. “One of their [Quaker] principles was and is equality of the sexes,” Paul said in a 1974 oral history. “So I never had any other idea.”
Paul’s place in the upper economic class allowed her to travel to Europe in early adulthood. She became interested in women’s voting rights when she joined the suffrage movement in England. There, she took part in rowdy protests, got arrested several times, and endured brutal forced feedings from British authorities.
Paul brought these tactics with her when she returned to the United States and became a leader in the American suffrage movement. She co-founded the NWP in 1917 and turned into a mastermind of public protest. She organized massive parades, coordinated White House picket campaigns that led to more than 150 arrests, and orchestrated hunger strikes while she and her fellow suffragists were imprisoned. Paul’s dramatic tactics helped draw attention to the cause of women’s suffrage. Her work paid off in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment, which banned voter discrimination based on sex, was ratified.
Nine years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Letha Mae Glover was born in Florida in 1929. She was raised by her grandparents in Georgia and grew up in the Baptist faith. As a Black child in the Jim Crow South, Letha Mae navigated a segregated world where equality between Black and white Americans seemed like a dream instead of reality. Even so, she learned to cultivate respect for others and insist on respect for herself. “White or Black, you have to treat me how you want to be treated,” she said. “Respect is not handed to anybody on a platter.”
When she turned 18 years old, Glover moved to North Carolina. There, she met Jesse Glover, an Army paratrooper, and the two married in 1951. Glover, who considered herself “old-fashioned,” put her energy into starting a family. She gave birth to her first child in 1954 and ended up raising six children – Donna, Tawanna, Kathy, Christopher, Leslie, and Terry. In her younger years, Glover thought she would become a missionary, but having children changed her path in life. “Looking back, this was the first part of the training to become a missionary,” she recalled. “I got the training by being a good mother – a good wife, a religious person, and a good mother.”
Map created using ArcGIS
The Glovers moved to Washington, DC, in 1956 and settled in a house on C Street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Letha Mae built her life within this three-block section of the district. She enjoyed a close relationship with her neighbors, both Black and white. She converted to Catholicism and attended St. Joseph’s church across the street from her home. And she reveled in raising well-behaved children. Her son even gave her the nickname “The Colonel.” “Children today don’t listen, but mine did,” Glover boasted. “Even when they were little, they knew Mom didn’t play.”
As her children were growing up, Glover looked for jobs close to home so she could keep an eye on her family. A neighbor worked at the NWP’s headquarters around the corner and told Glover they were looking for housekeepers. Glover had passed by the Belmont House hundreds of times but never thought much about what went on inside. From the outside, it looked deserted. Shades covered the windows and ivy stretched across the brick exterior. “It was the weirdest looking house you’ve ever seen,” Glover admitted. “I used to call it the haunted house.”
Even so, the closeness of the Belmont House to her own home appealed to Glover and she made her way inside to apply for a job. That job turned into a career that would last for the next three decades.
National Woman's Party collection, Library of Congress
Afternoons with Alice
When Glover started work at the Belmont House in September 1965, she joined a staff of housekeepers, cooks, maintenance workers, and gardeners. At the time, the headquarters functioned as a hotel for people who came in from out of town. NWP members, students, and lobbyists who were working at the nearby Capitol filled the rooms of the main house as well as the row house building next door. “This was just like a family house,” Glover remembered, “and I enjoyed working with all those people.”
Even though the house buzzed with people, the NWP had changed since its heyday in the 1910s. It was no longer made up of thousands of militant women who took to the streets for their rights. By the 1960s, its membership had dwindled dramatically. Those who remained were older women who used traditional lobbying practices to persuade members of Congress to support their causes. One thing remained the same, though: Alice Paul was the boss. Even when members elected new officers, they deferred to Paul and feared crossing her. Glover recalled one woman lamenting, “Alice is killing the party.” Glover responded, “Well you all are letting her do it.”
Glover could not understand the hesitation of some to stand up to Paul, because she did it all the time. “Funny thing was she loved me for it, because if I was right, I just couldn't see saying yes to something that I didn't believe,” Glover said. Paul seemed to appreciate Glover’s gentle dissent, but sometimes small arguments erupted into full-blown fights.
National Woman's Party collection, Library of Congress
One fight that stuck in Glover’s memory started over a rug. In her retelling, Paul asked her to tell the handyman to move a large rug in the house. Glover agreed and the man moved it to the new spot. When Paul saw the rug, she became angry and insisted she didn’t tell anyone to move it. Glover pushed back and reminded her that she did ask to move the rug. Paul dug her heels in and started yelling. Glover replied, “"Miss Paul, you can't holler as loud as I can. So you don't holler at me." The feud kept going and Glover gave up. “We were in her office and I got so mad at her, I just slammed the door real hard, "Whap!" And I walked out.”
After a few hours alone, the women came together again at the end of the day and patched things up. “I would disagree with her, but it would make me unhappy,” Glover confessed. “But that didn't change me. It didn't change me at all.”
National Woman's Party collection, Library of Congress
Glover and Paul had many more good days than bad days. Glover appreciated that Paul took an interest in her children and allowed her to go check on them throughout the day. Sometimes, Glover would bring her youngest child Terry to the house and Paul would take her out to the garden for a tea party. “For adults, she was kind of hard to get along with,” Glover remembered, “but she loved children.”
Glover also saw Paul as a teacher, especially when it came to the women’s movement. Paul’s singular focus for decades was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, legislation she co-wrote in 1923 that aimed to enshrine gender equality in the Constitution. Paul was famous for recruiting Belmont guests as volunteers for the ERA campaign, and Glover was no exception. She would call and write to members of Congress, file materials about the ERA in Paul’s personal archive, and listen to Paul explain the history and necessity of the amendment. Glover enjoyed learning about the ERA, but didn’t realize Paul expected her to “eat, sleep it and drink it!"
Glover never joined the NWP, but she felt good that Paul trusted her with these tasks. “She trusted me,” she said, “She tested me also.” Once in her early years at the house, she remembered Paul asking her if she knew her ABCs. Taken aback, she replied, “"What? Miss Paul, I'm grown. I have six kids!" Some might have seen this as a racial slight. After all, Paul had been publicly accused of ignoring the priorities of Black women in order to expedite voting rights for white women during the suffrage movement. But Glover didn’t see it this way. “I never got the feeling that she discriminated against black and white,” she explained. “There were a lot of black and white [people] mixing it up here [at the Belmont.] She never made any difference between them.”
Despite their rough patches, Glover and Paul came to admire and respect each other in the eight years they worked together. When Paul left the Belmont to go live in New Jersey in 1973, Glover was sad. “I knew she wasn't feeling that well,” she admitted. “But she was in very good spirits and we talked and she said, ‘Well you take care of yourself,’ and I said, ‘Well you take care of yourself.’ And I gave her a big hug and all, and she left.”
That was the last time Glover saw her employer and her friend. Alice Paul passed away in a nursing home near her childhood home on July 9, 1977. “She wasn't always easy to get along with, and she wasn't always easy to work with, but there was just something about her,” Glover said. “I look back on those years and think I respect people, but I don't think I was ever as close to anyone as I was to her.”
Alice Paul Center for Gender Justice
Becoming the Boss
When Paul left, Glover stayed on at the Belmont house. However, she had to navigate new working relationships with residents who saw her as “just the maid” rather than an expert in the upkeep of a historic home. A new NWP officer expected her to do personal tasks like paint her nails and pick up her dry cleaning. One day, the woman demanded that Glover scrub her bathroom floor on her hands and knees. “I don't get on my knees unless I'm praying,” Glover told her. “And today I'm not praying."
National Woman's Party collection, Library of Congress
Glover did continue praying outside of work, drawing strength from her church and her family. She remained a member at St. Joseph’s and regularly visited hospitals to pray with sick patients. She also stayed close to her husband and kids, who would often meet her at the Belmont after school and walk home together. When the kids grew into adults, Glover doted on 23 grandchildren, 60 great grandchildren, and five great-great grandchildren.
By the late 1980s, NWP leadership changed and the new officers promoted Glover to the house manager position. She took charge and became the boss of the home. She kept it clean, ordered supplies, coordinated events, oversaw renovations, and made a lasting impression on visitors as a tour guide in the museum. In 1991, the NWP threw a reception for Glover to recognize her decades of service. Officers and representatives from the National Park Service gave her a commemorative silver tray and colleagues, past and present, spoke about her hard work and dedication.
National Woman's Party collection, Library of Congress
Glover retired from the NWP in 1996 and passed away in June 2019. She is remembered by friends and family as a person who took care of everyone and everything, Alice Paul and the Belmont House included. “It took a few people here, later on, to really appreciate all the hardships that I went through, to honor me,” Glover recalled in her final years at the house. “So I feel like people who have just received a Grammy award or something like that…It feels pretty special to be honored and to share it with so many people.”
Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship
This article was made possible through generous support from the Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Park Foundation and American Conservation Experience. Learn more about the Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship.