How the Death of Inez Milholland Sparked the Picketing that Changed Wilson's Mind and Led to the 19th Amendment

Dean C. C. Langdell

August 26, 2020—Today is the Centennial of the formal Ratification of the 19th Amendment, which made it the Constitutional right for every woman in the United States to vote in elections.

Inez Milholland was a lawyer who served as a key ally of Alice Paul in forming and advancing the National Woman's Party, the activist arm of the campaign for Votes for Women.

Milholland was admitted to the Harvard Law School in October 1909 by the law faculty, with only three dissenting votes. The story of that vote is told in a new book by Bruce A. Kimball and Daniel R. Coquilette, The Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School, The Second Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

Ten years earlier, the Law School faculty voted, with only one dissenting vote, to support admitting women. The holdout was Christopher Columbus Langdell, who had retired as Dean in 1895 after a quarter-century in the position. He prepared a memorandum outlining eight reasons for not admitting women, and the Harvard Corporation, which was the entity that made the important decisions, followed his recommendation rather than that of the rest of the faculty, and voted against the idea.

In a three-page letter, Inez Milholland applied for admission to Dean James Barr Ames, who replaced Langdell in 1895. (Langdell died in 1906.) She had also sought entrance to a legal education at Oxford and Cambridge, to no avail. She had already achieved a substantial degree of notoriety as a Vassar student insurgent for women’s rights, having met Emmeline Pankhurst in London and having become a follower of the Pankhurst philosophy of disruptive action—she called herself a suffragette, a militant suffragist. The President of Vassar said to her father at graduation: “Wonderful girl, Inez. I’m glad she’s gone.”

The letter to Dean Ames was circulated to the Law School faculty with information about Milholland. Early in October 1909, the faculty voted to admit Milholland, with just three professors dissenting. She paid a visit a few days later to Henry Lee Higginson, a member of the Harvard Corporation, who wrote to Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell: “If we are to begin at all with women, we certainly can do no better than with this young lady.” However, Lowell decided that Harvard didn’t confer Harvard degrees on women, and a week after the faculty decision, the Harvard Corporation voted down the idea of allowing women to matriculate at the Law School.

Not until 1950 did the Harvard Law School admit its first female students.

Instead of going to the Harvard, Milholland attended NYU Law School in 1909-12. She helped workers in the garment industry strike in 1909 when she was in her freshman year at the Law School. In 1913 she led the Washington march for suffrage and in July married Eugen Boissevain. In 1916 she went with her sister Vida on a railway-based campaign in the western states and collapsed in Los Angeles, dying six weeks later. Her death galvanized the National Woman’s Party, which called on President Wilson in January 1917 and asked for him to support Votes for Women. He said, more or less, that (a) it was a state issue and (2) they would know that if they did their homework and appreciated  that Democrats couldn't afford to upset southern whites.

Hopping mad, the NWP initiated a picket of the White House. They were there Monday to Saturday every week. Eventually Wilson got tired of it and encouraged the DC police to end it. The “silent sentinels” from the NWP were arrested and taken to the Lorton prison/workshouse in Virginia. The arrested women went on a hunger strike and were force-fed. The painful experience was written out by Lucy Burns and her letter was released to the press. The ensuing bad publicity for Wilson induced him to  change his mind about supporting suffrage. It passed the House and the Senate. It then went to the states for ratification and the last required state, Tennessee, ratified the law on August 20, 1920. Six days later, i.e., this day one hundred years ago, the Amendment’s ratification was certified. Women had gained the formal right to vote nationally.