WASHINGTON — It was the first ray of light in the House in the long impeachment winter of discontent — the first time I'd seen smiles brighten faces in the hall and on the floor. Female members of Congress wore purple scarves over white ensembles as they headed for celebrations with out-of-town guests.

What was up?

Alice Paul, the suffrage champion who started the stir, was there only in spirit. She did not live to see the day her Equal Rights Amendment came back into play after being left for dead a few decades ago.

But she'd be pleased as punch to know Virginia finally became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, known as the ERA, in 2020. Texas passed it in 1972, along with most states in the '70s, so yes, Virginia was late to the game. (Yet in time for Women's History Month.)

Newly blue Virginia opened the door to revival. Thirty-eight states must ratify a constitutional amendment. The ERA at last reached that threshold after almost a century. Indeed, the amendment was proposed by Paul in 1923, after women won the right to vote in 1920.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, declared, "It is a shameful reality that the equal rights amendment has not been enshrined in the Constitution."

Here's the thing standing in the way: To thwart the ERA's momentum back in the '70s, some Southern senators gave passage by 38 states a deadline. 1982 was the deadline lawmakers imposed by resolution.

The ERA almost made it. It missed the deadline largely because Illinois failed when it was most needed. But that's another story, and besides, Phyllis Schlafly, the doer, is dead.

So, the House roll-call vote to remove the deadline for ratifying the ERA was 21st-century music to awaken hope in hearts that remembered the blow. The Democratic majority passed the measure, 232 to 183, along party lines. Only a few Republicans broke ranks.

Afterward, I ran into Rep. Jackie Speier, also a California Democrat, the chief sponsor. Let me quote from her floor speech: "We are done being paid less for our work, done being violated ... done being discriminated against simply because we are women."

Speier declared, "The ERA is about sisterhood, motherhood, survival, dignity and respect."

As for the ERA's chances of coming up for a vote in the Senate, where Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moves like molasses, that could wait another day. But not another century.

If only Alice Paul were alive to give advice, as she was the most brilliant political mind and strategist of the 20th century. It was her destiny to enlarge American democracy without firing a shot.

First, she made the 19th Amendment come true: votes for women, with a seven-year street campaign outside Woodrow Wilson's White House. She was 28 when she took on the president of the United States as a complete outsider — literally outside, creating scenes in public. She was not even a citizen.

Political theater was Paul's invention. She and her band of Seven Sisters college woman chained themselves to the White House gates; turned out for parades on Pennsylvania Avenue in white, purple and gold colors; burned Wilson's speeches in bonfires. Oh, he hated that.

Wilson, a proud Princeton man, was the last president to write his speeches.

Paul led the first American mass movement. The great civil rights marches and other human rights movements were based on her blueprint. It came from deep inside her outsider soul: nonviolent resistance.

Paul was born into the pacifist Religious Society of Friends. Also known as Quakers, this group was first to oppose slavery and embrace women's rights in the 19th century. Their organizing the Underground Railroad is a classic example of nonviolent resistance. It changed the world.

But they don't tell you these things in school. They didn't even tell me much about Alice Paul at my school, Swarthmore College, where she graduated in 1905. On my own, I learned she played tennis. She bicycled into Paris as a young woman. She hung out with London suffragettes and got arrested.

Finally, I learned the Princeton man met his game, set and match in Alice Paul.

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