When she was sent to Tennessee to push for the last vote needed to ratify the Nineteenth amendment, a local newspaper announced, “110 Pounds of Femininity Hit Memphis”.

[3] After graduating from the University of Oregon, Betty Gram embarked on a stage career, which she left when she came east to join the National Woman's Party (NWP), led by Alice Paul.

A front-page photo in the Evening Tribune of San Diego bore the caption, "Washington has found that the only way to keep a picket away from the White House is to put her in jail.

The charge of obstructing traffic was widely understood as a sham - the Oregonian newspaper clearly stated as much in an article covering the Gram sisters' arrest.

[8] But their arrests and ill-treatment did not deter the Grams or the other picketers, who continue pressuring President Wilson and Congress to take up a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.

In January 1919, Betty Gram was one of two sentries outside the White House standing guard over a bonfire in which they burned President Wilson's speeches.

[9] The next month she was arrested in Boston when 21 members of the National Woman's Party gathered in front of the State House with suffrage banners.

Betty became a leader in the ratification campaign, working in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware, West Virginia, Tennessee, and other states.

Having finally succeeded in their years-long effort, the National Woman's Party and other women's groups had to reconsider the makeup and mission of their organizations.

After marrying Raymond Swing in 1921, her husband's career as a radio commentator and foreign correspondent took them to England, where they lived for over a decade.

As historian Susan Becker describes the feminist movement in the 1920s and 1930s the NWP "stood alone throughout these two decades in its single-minded dedication to obtaining legal equality between men and women.

In the fall of that year, she gave a speech to the Inter-American Commission of Woman at the Pan-American Union warning that women would lose their hard-earned rights unless they were ready to fight for them.

A Washington Post article covering the speech described Betty as one of "the youngest and most beautiful leaders in international feminism.

The NWP drafted the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1921 and it provoked disputes almost immediately, even before it was introduced in Congress in 1923.

(With shades of their picketing days, Betty Gram Swing, NWP veteran Doris Stevens, and a few others attempted to present the Equal Rights Treaty to President Gaston Doumergue of France, while he was hosting negotiations of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Even though the United States was not a member of the League of Nations, the NWP focused its Treaty efforts there, using its relationships with Latin American women's groups for support.

Again, social feminists opposed the Treaty because they believed it would undermine international protectionist labor laws benefitting women.

The NWP supported international efforts like creating a UN commission on women partly in the hope that it would secure the ERA at home.

[20] A small collection of Betty Gram Swing's papers are housed at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.