A Modern Woman and Martyr of the Suffrage Movement
“I am prepared to sacrifice every so-called privilege I possess in order to have a few rights.”
“Beautiful and courageous, she embodied more than any other American woman, the ideals of that part of womankind whose eyes are on the future. She embodied all the things that make the Suffrage Movement something more than a fight to vote. She meant the determination of modern woman to live a full free life, unhampered by tradition.” The Philadelphia Ledger
By the time she died at the age of 30 in 1916, suffragist Inez Milholland had led one of the most fascinating lives in any century. She was as beautiful as she was spirited, intelligent, accomplished, and well-traveled. An activist, suffragist, lawyer, and war correspondent, Milholland was a champion for women, laborers, children, and the poor, and it is no wonder that when the suffrage leaders were looking to change a long-held public perception of suffragists as aged, unfeminine women for a new face of their movement, they chose Inez Milholland.
Milholland was raised in a home that fostered progressive ideas and civil rights; her wealthy father wrote for the New York Tribune and invented pneumatic tubes which years ago were prolific; miles of underground pneumatic tubes in New York City were used in banks, libraries, department stores and other large businesses, and in current times, seen primarily in banks.
While on a trip to London during her junior year at Vassar, Milholland participated in marches with British militant suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst. She was immediately inspired to bring that energy to the US, starting with her own school, but Vassar banned student activism so Milholland moved her suffrage meetings of 40-60 students and alumnae to a cemetery across the street, making it even more obvious with a large yellow banner stating “Come, Let Us Reason Together.” Her “Graveyard Rallies” were covered in the New York press, and in her senior year, Milholland’s group organized a 'Vassar Votes For Women” club. She finally persuaded the college president to host a debate about women’s suffrage, but to his chagrin, several professors sided with the students. Vassar's leadership held firm to their mission of “not to reform society but to educate women” which Milholland held as hypocritical. Her suffrage meetings at Vassar continued to the point that the school was noted in the New York Tribune as a “hotbed of suffrage and socialism.” As we know Milholland was not a traditional girl, she also ran track, played basketball, tennis, golf, and field hockey, and in her junior year was “All Around Best Athlete.”
In 1909, in New York City after graduating Vassar, Milholland heard a crowd outside and grabbed a megaphone, shouting out her window “Votes for Women!” to the Taft for President parade passing by. The parade crowd paused and asked her to speak, making this her first of countless speeches for women’s suffrage. She applied to Harvard, Columbia, and Yale but was rejected due to her gender. She was accepted at New York University Law School and continued her suffrage work as well as participated in the historic shirtwaist and laundry workers strikes, for which she was arrested.
Described as “the most beautiful girl in the suffrage movement” in 1913, Milholland at 27 years old “made an imposing figure” riding a white horse and dressed in white flowing Joan of Arc robes as she led the first-ever political parade in Washington DC. Photographs of Milholland from the March 3, 1913 parade are today some of the most iconic images of the 72-year suffrage movement. The Women’s Suffrage Procession was held the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, and it is estimated that between 5,000 - 8,000 suffragists from every state in the US traveled to DC to participate in the parade, with approximately 200,000 bystanders watching.
Milholland embodied the Modern Woman: educated, spirited, and seeking equality. After the 1913 parade, she met and married Dutch coffee importer Eugen Jan Boissevain, and as part of her “new freedom” as a woman, she proposed marriage to him. According to biographer Linda Lumsden, Milholland and Boissevain believed in free love and considered their relationship a fusion of mind, soul, and body.
In 1915 Milholland went to Europe and served as a war correspondent but was expelled due to her pacifist beliefs. Returning to the US in 1917 to join the militant National Woman’s Party, it was at this time that Milholland began a coast to coast speaking tour to campaign for a constitutional amendment for universal suffrage (votes for all). She collapsed while at the podium speaking in Los Angeles October 19, 1916 and died 10 weeks later as a result of pernicious anemia.
After her death, a memorial service was held in the US Capitol on Christmas Day (the first memorial service held there for a woman), and Mount Discovery near her family home in upstate New York was renamed Mt. Inez.
Inez Milholland appealed to elected and public officials, business owners, and anyone with power to recognize the humanity in all classes, and worked against child labor and capital punishment, and on behalf of wages and labor reform for women. Her intellect and passion not only presented a new image for the suffrage movement at a critical time, but her liberated spirit is the embodiment of the emancipated woman that we see today.
“She was avid for life, and impatient for a world fit to live in.” Alice Cheyney, Vassar classmate