Inez Milholland at NY City woman suffrage parade in 1913. She was an accomplished equestrian from her vacations in Lewis, N.Y. Source: Library of Congress (from Bain News Service). |
Summary of her life (with a few additions here to the NY Times bio):
- 1905-09 Campus activist at Vassar College, fighting for suffrage as the President, James Monroe Taylor, tried to silence all discussion as political.
- 1909 Rejected by Harvard and other U.S. law schools, and Oxford, because she was a woman. Harvard law school faculty accepted her but was overruled by the administration. Accepted by NYU.
- 1909 Arrested after demonstrating with striking women shirtwaist workers.
- 1909 Interrupted a campaign parade for President William Howard Taft, in New York, asking what he had done for the right of women to vote.
- 1912 Led woman suffrage parade in New York City. Received NYU Law School degree.
- 1913, March Led huge woman suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.
- 1913 Wrote a harsh report on prison conditions at Sing Sing for her firm, one of whose partners was Osborne.
- 1913, July Proposed marriage to a Dutch tobacco importer (later coffee importer) on board the Mauretania, and remained committed to free love; they were married secretly in London.
- 1915-16 Went on Ford Peace Ship and got off in Sweden because of patriarchy on the boat. Covered the Great War in Italy as a journalist, before getting thrown out of the country for negative reporting (she was a pacifist).
- 1916 Set out on a long whistle-stop train tour with her sister Vida, rallying support for the Federal Anthony Amendment.
- 1916, October Collapsed in Los Angeles, from exhaustion and anemia. After daily notices in the newspapers nationwide about her status, she died in November.