DEATH | Al[fred] Boissevain, January 5, 2016

The following is from The Almanac, January 2016. It is a weekly California newspaper published to about 15,000 readers in Menlo Park, Atherton, Portola Valley and Woodside. The paper was founded in 1965 by Hedy Boissevain, Jean Heflin and  Betty Fry. It was originally titled The Country Almanac. Embarcadero Publishing Compnay bought the Almanac in 1993.

Alfred 'Al' Boissevain, engineer and winemaker, dies at 92—Alfred "Al" Boissevain, whose late wife, Hedy Boissevain was a co-founder of The Almanac (Country Almanac), died January 5 in Bloomington, Indiana. He was 92.

Mr. Boissevain was born in Brooklyn and grew up on the Adirondack Poultry Farm, now the Meadowmont School of Music, in upstate New York. He attended Middlebury College, where he met his future wife, Hedvig "Hedy" Hogg. He graduated in 1945 and completed an additional degree at MIT in 1946.

Turning a lifelong passion for flight into a profession, he was employed as an aeronautical engineer at Chance-Vought in Connecticut before accepting a position with the National Space Administration (later NASA) at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

While at NASA he worked on many projects, including design work on the early supersonic test planes and the Mercury capsules for the early space missions, as well as early development of equipment and procedures used in the initial Mars landing.

At the end of his career, he was back to airplanes, working on designs for short take-off and landing aircraft for several years. Living in Portola Valley, he was active in the community, serving on the school board for several years. He was a member of Ladera Community Church and active in the construction of its present building.

After retiring from NASA in 1978, he and his wife established Vinehill, a vineyard specializing in chardonnay and viognier, in Georgetown, California. Mr. Boissevain became an award-winning winemaker, marketing his grapes to wineries within the El Dorado appellation, as well as to home winemakers.

Retiring a second time, 30 years later, he moved to Bloomington, where his daughter resides. He is survived by his children, Claire (Phillip Crooke) of Bloomington, Paul (Margaret) of Hancock, Mich., and Charles (Nancy) of Oakland; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Hedy, died in 1998.

Memorial contributions may be made to The Sycamore Land Trust, P.O. Box 7801, Bloomington IN 47407.

VOTES FOR WOMEN | Turning Point Suffrage Memorial Open!

May 16, 2021—The Turning Point Suffrage Memorial was formally opened today. 

The  program was well thought out, was preceded and followed by well-executed videos, and the memorial itself was shown in an inspiring way.

I was personally pleased to see that the old feuds between the activists (Inez Milholland was proud to call herself a suffragette) of the National Woman's Party and the legislation-oriented suffragists in NAWSA were united in their support of the memorial.

Also, it was encouraging to see the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority properly represented. It was originally an offshoot of Alpha Sorority at Howard University. Its twenty-two members were allowed to join the suffrage march in 1913. A century later, the Deltas were the main participants!

Congratulations to Jane Barker and Pat Wirth for pulling this off.

Here's a YouTube video prepared for showing before and after the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sSlMlbAEHE

Here is the Farifax County attractions listing:

https://www.fxva.com/listing/turning-point-suffragist-memorial/2080/

MARCONI | Jamesons and MacDonnells

Guglielmo Marconi

April 25, 2021—This day was born (in 1874) Guglielmo Marconi, in Bologna, Italy.  He has at least three connections to Inez Milholland, all of them via the Jamesons, the Irish whiskey family.

First, he was engaged to Inez for several months but his mother didn't like the idea. He was working on his ship-to-shore communications on a Cunard ship, as I recollect the Carpathia, and Inez was on her way to the Willard school in Berlin. She had to take some courses so she could qualify for entrace to Vassar, which at that time had specific rigorous requirements for admission. They were engaged after a shipboard romance, but it seems that Marconi's Irish mother, a member of the Jameson whiskey family, did not want to have an American whisk off with her son. He broke off the engagement on the basis that she was too young. They remained friends for the rest of her life.

Second, his Jameson mother was of crucial help to his company. He was interested in electricity and used the work of Heinrich Hertz to use electromagnetic or "radio" waves for communication. Marconi began building his own equipment and conducting experiments when he was twenty. In 1895, he moved his equipment outdoors and was able to transmit over a hill, at a distance of about a mile. Six years later, he sent and received a signal across the Atlantic Ocean. The two radio operators aboard the Titanic were Marconi employees, and the British Postmaster General said: "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi ... and his marvelous invention." Nikola Tesla was Marconi's chief competitor, in addition to the telegraph companies that relentlessly resisted Marconi's invention throughout his life. Tesla said he had been ready to transmit a signal over fifty miles in 1895, but a fire destroyed his work. Marconi's work was performed using seventeen components patented by Tesla, but Marconi's mother's connections with the Jameson whiskey empire helped him stay in business, as well as support from Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. Tesla's patents were overturned in favor of Marconi's in 1904, and Marconi received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1911. However, in 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's original patent. Lots of injustice to go round. Inez Milholland's father, John E. Milholland, was actively soliciting business from the British Postmaster General (as well as the U.S. Postmaster General, but that is another story entirely). Mr. Milholland was seeking to build and lease a pneumatic tube system that would deliver mail within London int he same way it transmitted sales slips within department stores.

Third, Inez married another Jameson relative, Eugen Boissevain. Eugen's father was a young Dutch reporter covering the Irish Horse Show, a trade fair, when he got sick. He was brought to the Dalkey home of the MacDonnells ("Sorrento Cottage," because the view of Bray was like the view at Sorrento) and young Emily Heloise MacDonnell fell in love with the young man she was looking after. She moved with him to Amsterdam and never really picked up the Dutch language—she spoke English with her children and their English governess, Polly. Three of the Boissevains' eleven children moved to the United States (Olga Emily, Robert and Eugen Boissevain). A fourth of the eleven children, Jan, lived in the United States for a while, married an American actress (Charlotte Ives) and finally settled in the South of France on the Cap d'Antibes. I visited her in 1959. When Eugen first met Inez at the restaurant of the Holland House in New York City, he was working for Guglielmo Marconi's company.

DU BOIS, W.E.B. | Birth, February 23

W. E. B. Du Bois

February 23, 2021—This day in 1868 was born W.E.B Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He said he didn't really notice racial discrimination in his virtually all white town—only when people visited from out of town.

He studied at Fisk University in Nashville and then to Harvard, where he was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. 

He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and he became known as a  serious sociologist when he showed that poverty and crime in black communities resulted from racial barriers in education and employment. 

Du Bois under Taft

Republican President Taft found the legacy of Abraham Lincoln to be a burden in the south. He announced in his inaugural address that he would not appoint any Black men to federal jobs, reversing Theodore Roosevelt's policy of supporting Lincoln’s progressive stand in the south. Taft's "Southern Policy" supported whites' protests and he removed most Black office holders in the South.

In 1909, Booker T. Washington argued for training Blacks for industrial work, with only a few seeking higher education. He believed that in due course black people would rise socially and economically. DuBois argued against him, demanding more proactive steps toward equality. Black people in both the North and South began their drift toward the Democratic party that exploded with Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

Du Bois lived at 409 Edgecombe Ave. apartment building, which has a history dating back to the Harlem Renaissance, reported WNYC.  https://www.wnyc.org/story/visit-oldest-sidewalk-scaffold-new-york-city/. (The building has the oldest continuous sidewalk shed permit in the city, granted on April 27, 2006. The scaffolding went up to protect people from falling debris during a restoration project. But it stayed up after a lightning strike damaged that work and funds ran dry.)

The Founding of the NAACP

In 1905, Du Bois was a founder and general secretary of the Niagara Movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals. Du Bois founded and edited The Moon (1906) and The Horizon (1907-1910) as organs for the Niagara Movement.

In 1909, Du Bois was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The founding Treasurer was John E. Milholland, a newspaper publisher and editor whose elder daughter was Inez Milholland. Inez wrote a letter to Du Bois asking for space to write in his magazine and offering to serve as a "perpetual volunteer."  https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b162-i383

Du Bois identified as a socialist and belonged to the Socialist Party from 1910 to 1912.

The National Negro Committee was first located in John E. Milholland's Constitution League office at 500 Fifth Avenue. After Villard was persuaded to come aboard, the office was moved to space that he provided. The NAACP name was not established at the second annual meeting, on May 12, 1910. It expanded the Committee of Forty to 100, with a requirement that each of them give or raise $100. The Executive Committee was set at 30 members. The first Executive Committee created officers of the NAACP–with Walling as Chairman, Milholland as Treasurer and Villard as Disbursing Treasurer.

On June 28, 1910 six members attended an Executive Committee meeting. Milholland moved and Ovington seconded a motion to hire W. E. B. Du Bois as director of the Department of Publicity and research of the NAACP. Later in life, Du Bois remembers Ovington, Walling and Villard as the founders of the NAACP. But if Ovington was the engine that drove the creation of the NAACP, the fuel to run it was provided by Milholland. The multi-racial NAACP spelled the end of the Niagara Movement. Du Bois saw that an organization with some establishment (white) sponsors could generate more money to pay for staff, starting with himself. By the third and fourth meetings of the NAACP in Boston and Chicago in 1912, the NAACP was well established (Wedin, pp. 120-135).

Until May 18, 2008, the Wikipedia entry for the NAACP omitted Milholland from its description of the founders. The founding was scheduled for February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and this is considered the founding date of the NAACP although it actually took place in May. 

On May 8, 2008, the entry read: "On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, co-founder of the NAACP. 

At a second conference, on May 30, 1910, members formally called the organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected the first officers (as reported by Mary White Ovington): • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from NYC and Lewis, NY) • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois."

In 1910-34, DuBois edited the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. In it, he directed constant, often bitter, invective at white Americans while providing information to Blacks. The magazine published many young Black writers. Racial protest after World War I focused on securing anti-lynching legislation. During this period the NAACP was the leading protest organization and Du Bois its leading figure. The Crisis had more than 100,000 readers.

Milholland's Costly Support of the NAACP

Omitting Milholland's name is unfair because he contributed significantly to the NAACP and it proved to be a costly project for him when Woodrow Wilson became president. Milholland became wealthy because he obtained contracts with the Taft Administration for new pneumatic tubes to deliver mail within Manhattan. (There are 27 miles of these tubes or small tunnels under the roads of Manhattan.) 

With his new wealth, Milholland devoted himself to a Presbyterian religion-inspired vision of a world in which wealth was more equally distributed and civil rights were widely respected. He worked first with Booker T. Washington but became impatient with Washington's gradualism. Following critiques of Washington by Du Bois in 1900-01, Milholland shifted his financial resources away from Washington and toward Du Bois.

Milholland's religion-fired activism on behalf of Blacks contributed to a rapid decline in his fortunes. Milholland, a Republican, attacked as a racist Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster-General–the same man with control over lucrative contracts that were the basis for with the Batcheller Company's prosperity. His gifts to, and statements on behalf of, the cause of civil rights had an immediately negative impact on his business. He and his family paid dearly for his support of civil rights. Investors and taxpayers also paid dearly—investors saw the value of Milholland's company decline, while taxpayers did not benefit from the efficiencies that the Post Office had intended to bring to intra-urban mail delivery.

The 1904 edition of Polk's directory shows the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Company as a going concern with Milholland as President and B. C. Batcheller on the board. In 1905, the company had offices in New York City and Philadelphia as well as in London, Paris and Berlin. By the Poor's directory of 1917, John E. Milholland was replaced as President and was no longer on the Board.  Instead, Milholland was represented on the board by his son-in-law Eugen Boissevain (my mother's uncle).

Du Bois Resigns, 1934

Du Bois resigned after an ideological rift with the group. In 1935, he published Black Reconstruction, a Marxist interpretation of the post-Civil War era. At Atlanta University, where he later taught, he founded a review of race and culture called Phylon in 1940 and the same year published Dusk at Dawn, in which he examined his own career as a case study of race dynamics.

In 1934, Du Bois resigned from the NAACP board as well as from The Crisis because of his new advocacy of a Black nationalist strategy that ran in opposition to the NAACP’s commitment to integration. 

However, he returned to the NAACP as director of special research in 1944-1948. During this period, he was active in placing the grievances of Blacks before the United Nations, serving as a consultant to the UN founding convention in San Francisco in 1945 (my father was also there representing the U.S. Bureau of the Budget) and writing the famed “An Appeal to the World” published in 1947. He broke again with the NAACP permanently after a major disagreement. 

He joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he became a naturalized citizen at the age of 95. He died in Ghana in 1963, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington. Du Bois had two children with his wife, Nina Gomer. 

The NAACP is still going strong, fighting racism and bridging cultural divides. It was headed by Cornell Brooks for a while. A predecessor of Brooks as an officer of the NAACP was the late former Chairman Julian Bond.

Sources: Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998). Mary Ovington, Clare Coss

https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8826400924894495156/1340986641341498074 John E. Milholland https://inezmb.blogspot.com/2015/11/john-e-milhollands-role-in-founding-of.html https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-w-e-b-dubois/

 

MILLAY | Birth, February 22 (129 in 2021)

February 22, 2021 — Today is the 129th birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her husband Eugen Jan Boissevain was married first to Inez Milholland and after she died in 1916, he made a success of his business and then in 1923 gave it up to marry Millay and serve as her impresario and often carer. Both Milholland and Millay were Vassar alumnae.

Millay is said to be the only English-speaking woman in the 20th century who made a living at writing and reading poetry. W. H. Auden, who attended Christ Church, Oxford, was the only man.

In honor of Millay's birthday, here is the text of Take Up the Song, produced in Rochester's GEVA Theater in 1998, on the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, a staged reading. An edited videotape of the play was completed in 2004, and the text is shown here. Both Milholland and Millay are characters in the play. https://bit.ly/3pEjR7O.

Link to reading of "What lips my lips have kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay — https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-february-22-2021/.

MILLAY | Recuerdo (The Ferry Poem)

Millay

(This poem was shown on the New York City subway system for years, in its Poetry in Motion series...)

Recuerdo

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came
       soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold

We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-
       covered head,
And bought a morning paper which neither of us
       read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and
       pears,
and we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

 

Note: Millay's poems are now in the public domain. She died on October 19, 1950, 70 years ago, a year after her husband Eugen Boissevain died of cancer. Millay wrote: "I never did anything for you but survive you. But that was much." Here is a fine 2017 tribute to Millay on the 100th anniversary of her graduation from Vassar—https://stories.vassar.edu/2017/170202-millay-at-steepletop.html.

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.

Suffragettes in the USA? Yes indeed.

Emmeline Pankhurst

August 11, 2020—An article last month in The New York Times leads off with a statement by Susan Ware that American suffragists never used the word "suffragette" in reference to themselves. It was used by "only their detractors." (Postscript, August 16, 2020: This statement was repeated on p. 8 of "How American Women Won the Right to Vote," a special section today of The New York Times.)

Susan Ware said (p. 9 of today's special section) she wrote to fellow Wellesley alumna Hilary Clinton to ask her not to call the women activists "suffragettes". Ware is both right and wrong.

Right, it was a British term. As Elaine Weiss notes in the conversation (p. 8 of today's special section), the word "suffragette" was initially used derisively, by journalist Charles Hands writing for the Daily Mail in 1906, to refer to the activist British women who followed Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and created the Woman's Social and Political Union (WSPU). It was nonetheless embraced by the WSPU, who pronounced the word suffragette with a hard "g" and said that suffragettes not only wanted the vote but would get it.

Right, it was considered by American suffragists to be incorrect. Most women working for the vote were lined up doing day-to-day advancement of Votes for Women with Carrie Chapman Catt via NAWSA (the merged post-Civil War woman suffrage group, the National American Woman Suffrage Association). They called themselves suffragists. They eschewed civil disobedience and disruption, which were techniques used by the WSPU. After President Wilson capitulated, the suffrage movement sought to moderate its militancy as the ratification process moved from state to state, and suffragist became the accepted term.

But... leaders of the National Woman's Party did call themselves suffragettes. Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Harriot Stanton Blatch and Inez Milholland Boissevain were all trained by the Pankhursts. Like the WSPU, they were critical of the slow rate of progress of traditional suffrage organizations in pursuing the vote. They were determined to be more activist and therefore embraced the term suffragettes.

When President Woodrow Wilson sarcastically rejected an appeal in January 1917 by a delegation from the National Woman's Party (NWP) to honor the 1916 death of Inez Milholland Boissevain and support the Anthony Amendment, the NWP initiated nonstop picketing of the White House. The picketers were arrested at the President's urging, and when they went on a hunger strike (in approved Pankhurst fashion) at the Occaquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia, they were force-fed. When word got out about the force-feeding of the women prisoners, public opinion shifted in favor of the activists. Wilson changed his mind and supported the Anthony Amendment, after which the House and Senate quickly passed the Amendment in May 1919. 

Votes for Women became U.S. law when the last needed state, Tennessee, ratified the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920. The amendment was certified by the Secretary of State on August 26, 1920. The New York Times awarded a gold pen to NAWSA and a silver inkstand to the NWP. You could say, the suffragists and the suffragettes won the vote together.

TURNING POINT MEMORIAL | Deltas Donate $100,000!

"The Turning Point Suffrage Memorial Association wishes to extend its appreciation and thanks

to its long-time partner, Delta Sigma Theta, Inc., for its generous $100,000 gift toward construction of the memorial. In light of the loss of anticipated government grants, this major gift will allow the association to complete two major segments of the memorial that had been put on hold!"

In 1913, there were more than 5,000 white marchers and fewer than 100 Black marchers in the parade for Votes for Women headed up by Inez Milholland Boissevain. She had championed, in opposition to Alice Paul's fears about having Black women marching in the parade in segregated Washington, the inclusion of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority that had recently been created at Howard University.

In 2013, the ratio of Black to white marchers was reversed. More here: https://inezmb.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-significance-of-march-of-deltas.html.

SENECA FALLS | Convention Opened July 19, 1848

Lucretia Mott

July 19, 2020—This day in 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention opened, the first Convention on Women's Rights.

When the organizers of the convention (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others) arrived at the Wesleyan Church in Seneca Falls, New York before the event that morning, they found:

• A small crowd of women already waiting. The church was locked. Someone helped Stanton's nephew through a window, and he unlocked the church.
• Men, who had been invited only to the second day of the conference.

The women decided to let the men stay, provided they held off talking until the second day.

One of the men who was waiting was former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He had run an announcement of the event in his Rochester-based paper, The North Star.

The five Convention organizers (Lucretia Mott and three other Quakers, plus Elizabeth Cady Stanton) had drafted started drafting a women's Declaration of Independence,  starting "All men and women are created equal." Stanton took the document home with her and drafted what she called a Declaration of Sentiments with "injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman" and 11 resolutions calling for religious, economic and political equality. The ninth resolution called for women to be given the vote.

Mott was not in favor of this. She feared it went too far. "Lizzie," she said, "thee will make us ridiculous."

Stanton held firm, and the resolution stayed in. Stanton took the podium for the evening session, and she compellingly placed the struggle for women's rights in the tradition of the other reforms like the temperance and anti-slavery movements.

Frederick Douglass was the only African American person attending. He spoke up, saying, "In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world."

His comments were part of the suffrage play that I wrote that was featured at an event in Vienna, Virginia sponsored by the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial in 2017.

Eventually, one hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in her diary, many years later: "We are sowing winter wheat which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy."

It would be 72 years before women would be granted the right to vote––and effectively, it was only white women who were effectively granted that privilege, because of state laws that restricted voting by African Americans.

Only one of the signers of the original Declaration of Sentiments was still living in 1920. Charlotte Woodward, who had been 19 and working in a glove factory in 1848, was too ill to vote.

THE VOTE | PBS, American Experience, July 6 and 7, 9 pm

Inez Milholland Boissevain's last words before collapsing in Los Angeles in 1916:
"Mr. President: How long must women wait for liberty?"

July 6, 2020—American Experience on PBS will be showing "The Vote," a two-part series on Channel 13, tonight, July 6th and tomorrow, July 7th, at 9pm. The 19th Amendment, which extended the vote to women, was ratified by the last required state (Tennessee) in August 1920. This year marks the Centennial. Through hundreds of photographs, antique video footage, and illuminating commentary, "The Vote" tells the frustrating but exciting story of the 72-year struggle by American women for political equality.

WOMEN PIONEERS | Alice Huyler Ramsey

Alice Huyler Ramsey, pioneer driver, 1909. Photo:
 Library of Congress and Smithsonian Magazine.

June 9, 2020—This day, in 1909, Alice Huyler Ramsey set off in the rain from New York City for San Francisco in a Maxwell 30 automobile.

She was determined to become the first woman to drive across the United States. She traveled with three other women, none of whom knew how to drive!

Just over five feet, 22 years old, she posed next the car with her rubber helmet and visor in the rain until she got tired of the umbrella-toting cameramen. She kissed her husband goodbye and cranked the motor to start up the car.

Alice Ramsey and team first stopped at Poughkeepsie, according to the Vassar Alumnae Magazine. She was two years out of Vassar, two years ahead of Inez Milholland, and had a comfortable stop at her alma mater before proceeding across country on the so-called highways of the day. It was the month that Inez Milholland made her famous graveyard speech at Vassar. At graduation, the President of Vassar confided to Inez's father about his daughter: "Wonderful girl, Inez. I'm glad she's gone."

The four women in the car wore ponchos to keep themselves dry. Their touring car was a dark-green, four-cylinder, 30-HP Maxwell DA, with two bench seats and a removable pantasote roof.

Two men laid the groundwork for her trip:

• Her husband, John Rathbone Ramsey, decided to purchase a car for his wife when her horse was spooked by one. Ramsey found she enjoyed driving around the mostly dirt roads near her Hackensack, New Jersey, home.
• Then she entered a 200-mile endurance drive across Long Island to Montauk and back and an unidentified representative of automaker Maxwell-Briscoe Company saw her driving and was impressed. He proposed an expense-paid trip in a 1909 Maxwell, courtesy of the company,  if she would drive the other direction, across the country (but not back again; she took the train).

It all happened and she and her crew of three spent nights at hotels, eating restaurant food and an occasional home-cooked meal. They defied the advice of doctors, who warned that it was dangerous for women even to ride in cars because at 20 miles an hour it would overstimulate them. In fact, when the women got to the Cleveland Highway in Ohio they attained "the terrific speed" of 42 miles per hour with no ill effects. Ramsey fixed at least one tire blowout by then and had called for a mechanic to repair a coil in Syracuse, waiting near their car as someone in the crowd cried “Get a horse!” Altogether they went through 11 spare tires.

In the Midwest, the car ran out of gas. The women had forgotten to check the specially enlarged 20-gallon tank frequently enough. Some muddy roads proved practically impassable for the tread-less tires. At one point the women had to sleep beside an overflowed creek until the water receded. They took 13 days to go 360 miles, being towed by horses from time to time.

There were no road signs then. Ramsey relied on the Blue Book series of automotive guides, which gave directions using landmarks, but sometimes the route changed. And there were no books for regions west of the Mississippi River.

Unlike Robert Frost, when Ramsey came to a crossroads, she chose the road more traveled by. For example, she followed the roads with telegraph poles “with the greatest number of wires.”

On certain days, the Maxwell-Briscoe Company hired pilot cars familiar with the area to lead them. Even so, the party sometimes hit a dead end at a mine or sandpit and had to backtrack.

Locals rode horses for miles and waited by roadsides for hours to catch a glimpse of the Ramsey team. Only six years had passed since Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson’s 1903 drive marked the first male cross-country success.

They arrived in San Francisco on August 7, 1909. The trip took 59 days, 41 of them driving, and covered 3,800 miles. In 1960, the Automobile Manufacturers Association named her their “First Lady of Automotive Travel” for her trek across a “trackless land.”

Ramsey outlived Maxwell-Briscoe, which was absorbed in 1926 by Chrysler. She lived on to 1983. She was the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, in 2000. Her book about the trip was called Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron (1961). An abbreviated story from the book was printed in the Smithsonian Magazine on the centennial of the cross-country drive.

Other women pioneers in automobile history include Mary Dickerman Woodin, mother of William H. Woodin, FDR's first Secretary of the Treasury, who hired my father in 1933 for his first job working at the Farm Credit Administration. Woodin's mother was the first woman to obtain a driver's license in the State of Pennsylvania.

VIEWS | 55K, Eight Most-Read Posts

This blog has passed 55,000 page views. Thank you for reading.

The eight most-read posts since inception of the blog are shown below.

Entry

AMSTERDAM | Herengracht + Keizersgracht (Updated A... Apr 11, 2016

BOISSEVAIN Gen7 | Eugen–Tough and Tender (Updated ... Nov 17, 2015

SENECA FALLS | First Day, July 19 Jul 19, 2015

INEZ | Led the 1913 Parade on Horseback Apr 20, 2013

BOISSEVAINS Gen4 | Daniel Sr. (1772-1834) Family G... Mar 16, 2016, 3 comments

INEZ | Her Herald Uniform 1913 (Update Aug. 5, 201... Feb 27, 2013

INEZ | Washington March, 2013 – The Deltas Mar 5, 2013

BOISSEVAIN Gen6 | The Charlestjes (Updated July 6,... May 7, 2016

DEATH | Romelia ("Rommy") Boissevain

Romelia  ("Rommy") Anne
Boissevain, 1941-2020

May 14, 2020—I heard from Noah Sisk that his great-aunt Romelia ("Rommy") Boissevain passed away early last week. 

Rommy was at the Boissevain family reunion in Amsterdam in April 2016, and attended the tour of the Dutch canals with other family members including Noah Sisk. I was nominally the leader of the tour and wrote about that here. Noah remembered that my wife Alice left the tour with Rommy because Rommy was tired from all the walking.

Noah says: "Rommy suffered from poor health in the past few years, but she was always a very hip and fun lady. She was also particularly close with my aunt Kim [Kimberley Buck]."

Her obituary appears below: 

New London - Romelia "Rommy" Anne Boissevain, 78, recently of New London, passed away peacefully Tuesday, May 5, 2020. She was born June 19, 1941, in Kingston, Mass. to her adoring parents, Matthijs Gideon Jan and Helen (Fiske) Boissevain.

In 1954, her family moved to Northwest Corner Road in North Stonington. Rommy, as she was known to all who knew and loved her infectious laugh and ever-present smile, attended Wheeler High School, where she was valedictorian. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from Central Connecticut State College in New Britain and later, obtained a master's degree from Eastern Connecticut State College. A beloved teacher, Rommy was a reading specialist who helped countless students learn to love learning at schools in North Stonington, New York State, East Hampton and most recently, at the Nathan Hale School in New London.

She also was a real estate agent; and in retirement, cultivated a love of painting. She participated in a teacher exchange program with educators in Norway and made several trips to Europe. She especially loved touring Holland with her family and seeing the childhood environs of her father's native Amsterdam. She cherished family camping trips, daylong excursions to Rhode Island beaches and trips all over the U.S.

Rommy also carried on her father's love of genealogy. She fervently studied her family's background and helped many others to start researching theirs. A generous mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend, she loved being called "Oma" by her grandkids, Austin, Mia and Wyatt and "Tante Oma" by her many dear nieces and nephews. She was known to always keep her home and heart open to all.

Special thanks are given by her family to the staff of Harbor Village Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in New London for their care. She is survived by her loving sons, Deron (Susan) Bayer of Lakeville and Jon Bayer of New London. She is also survived by her brother Robert (Elaine) Boissevain; and her sisters, Pamela (Wayne) Wilkinson, Kimberley (Robert) Buck and Mia Boissevain; and her sister-in-law Wendy Boissevain. She was predeceased by her brothers, Bruce Boissevain and Lance Boissevain. She leaves many cousins across the U.S. and Holland. A Celebration of Life for her will take place at a date to be announced.

OCCOQUAN | Lavinia Lloyd Dock

Lavinia Lloyd Dock, Suffragist

May 1, 2020—It being the time of the Pandemic, it is appropriate to remember suffragists who were nurses. One of them was Lavinia Lloyd Dock. She is the subject of the May suffragist-of-the-month post by the Long Island suffragists.

Beginning with her work with the United Workers of Norwich, Connecticut, Lavinia Lloyd Dock made valuable contributions to public health nursing, including work with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. 

She was also a prolific author; her works include Materia Medica for Nurses, one of the earliest nursing textbooks, and a four-volume History of Nursing, written with Adelaide Nutting.

In addition, she was active in the women's suffrage movement and an advocate of legislative control of nursing practice. She was jailed three times at the Occoquan women's workhouse, which I have visited. This will be the site of the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial.

She and her husband had a daughter Mira Lloyd Duck who became a botanist and a civic leader in her home town of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

BIRTH | W. E. B. DuBois, February 23,

W E B Dubois (1868-1963). Photo by
Carl Van Vechtem.

This day in 1868 was born scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, the first African-American to do so, with his dissertation on the slave trade, which Harvard published as the first in a series.

He continued his study of racism with his second book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), which popularized Du Bois’s idea of “the talented tenth,” the  one-out-of-ten probability that a black man will become a black leader.

In 1905, he  met with 30 other African-American scholars, artists, and activists in Ontario, Canada, near Niagara Falls, to discuss the challenges facing people of color. (Blacks were not allowed rooms at white-run U.S. hotels.)

From this first meeting came the formation in 1909 of the NAACP, which pursued the goal of integrating blacks into the American middle class. John E. Milholland, the Irish-born father of Inez Milholland, became a friend of Du Bois and was the first Treasurer of the NAACP. He provided space and other resources for the NAACP office. Like Inez Milholland for a time, Du Bois was a declared socialist in 1910-12. He served as director of publicity and research for the NAACP from 1910 to 1934.

The alternative vision for American blacks was led by Booker T. Washington, who believed in the idea of a separate path of achievement for blacks. With a gift from Andrew Carnegie, Washington built up what became Tuskegee University. Washington lived for a while in Fort Salonga, Long Island.

Du Bois died in Nkrumah's Ghana in 1963. Nkrumah called him "a phenomenon."

BIRTH | Betty Friedan, February 4

Betty Friedan, 1921-2006

February 4, 2020 – This day was born feminist Betty Friedan, in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921, the year after the passage of the 19th amendment including women among the enfranchised. (Next year will be the 100th anniversary of her death.)

She was not popular in high school, being unconventional in looks and behavior. She was smart, though, and excelled at Smith.

After marrying and having a conventional suburban life, she surveyed her Smith peers at their 15th reunion and found a lot of discontent among them, which she called  "the problem that has no name." She wrote a book about this, about the myth that women were expected to find fulfillment in domestic lives as mothers and wives. Her name for the myth became a book, The Feminine Mystique (1963).

It was a best-seller, and helped kick off the "second wave" of feminism, the "first wave" being women's suffrage, which would have to be a long ("Kondratieff") wave since it lasted from 1848 to 2020. She marched with Gloria Steinem in 1970 in New York City to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the recognition of the right of women to vote. This year is the 100th anniversary; Friedan would have been 99 years old.

Betty Friedan lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y. during the summers. She spoke at a NY City Hall performance in 1995 of my suffrage play, "Take Up the Song," and again at a performance at the Springs Church. I remember picking her up at her home and dropping her off again and being impressed with her edgy take on current events. She died the same year as my mother, 2006.

INEZ | News about Inez from Lewis, N.Y

Inez Milholland near the U.S. Treasury at the end of
the Suffrage March in March 1913. Long forgotten, she
 is being remembered well in 2020.

We just received an update from Sandra Weber, who helped produce a version of my 1998 play, "Forward into Light", at the Lewis Church, where Inez Milholland Boissevain is buried.

Sandra's email to a few Inez fans is posted below, with her permission. I have added some links to her references to save time for readers:

Words cannot express my gratitude to all of you for your efforts towards bringing Inez into the Light. Your years of campaigning and promoting have come together into a glorious force of recognition in the past year, and especially the past few weeks. I am filled with such joy and inspiration and hope for the future.
I would like to share with you a few planned and unplanned events I have witnessed in the recent days. Yesterday, at the Adirondack Women’s March at the grave of Inez, we celebrated the life and legacy of Inez, particularly the official naming of Mount Inez. Thank you, Nancy Duff Campbell. And, Molly from Adirondack Explorer is creating a short documentary about the naming of Mount Inez.
We unveiled the placing of an Inez challenge coin (sponsored by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership) at the entrance to the Milholland gravesite. And we celebrated Alice Paul, and Virginia’s ratification of the ERA.
On Wednesday evening, January 15, I attended the creation of an Inez mosaic at the Keene Central School. This was a project of the Art Force 5 of Alfred University, which is doing an amazing job of promoting women in history. And they created an Inez T-shirt, too.
And, Martha Wheelock, they played your Forward Into Light documentary [financed by as a kickstarter project] during the creation of the mosaic. I expect you will be receiving many requests for your DVD. This is only the first month of 2020–and look at the momentum already created.
Last year I led an Inez tour for Adirondack Architectural Heritage and will repeat this year, along with an Inez lecture at the Adirondack Experience Cabin Fever Series on February 9. I am also part of a group planning a Champlain Valley Centennial Suffrage Auto Tour which includes events honoring Inez Milholland, including a celebration of her birthday (tentatively scheduled for August 2). Links and photos of the mosaic project, the coin, the Women’s March, and Mount Inez are at Adirondack Women’s March website [link is above].

Jane Barker, then Chair of the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial,
with the restored portrait of Inez Milholland, which long hung
over the fireplace of the National Woman's Party HQ in
Washington, DC. (Photo by JT Marlin, 2016.)

I could also add the Roadside Marker that was placed in 2017 to recognize this famed favorite daughter.

Also the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial planned for Lorton, Virginia, which raised  $40,000 in 2017 with another version of my play at the Vienna Country Club in Vienna, Virginia.

Also the move for women's statues in Central Park (Inez was one of ten New York Times nominees).

Also the raising of $4,000 to restore the National Woman's Party portrait of Inez Milholland Boissevain. (See photo at right of Jane Barker in 2016, at the celebration of the completion of the portrait's restoration).

Please send any other news about Inez to teppermarlin at aol dot com, or any links I have missed, and your blogger will post here as a compendium of Ineziana.

MOUNT INEZ | Town of Lewis Follows Up, A Century Later

From the Elizabethtown Post,
December 7, 1916.

October 9, 2019–Yesterday evening, the Lewis (Essex County, NY) Town Council voted to rename Mount Discovery. The new name is "Mount Inez".

The mountain is named after Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916), who spent her childhood and summers here and is buried on a hill in the graveyard behind the Lewis church.

This is the fulfillment of a name change made after Inez's  death in 1916, by the then-owner of the property, John E. Milholland, her father.

The commitment was at that time apparently formalized by the then government of the Town of Lewis. It was announced in the Elizabethtown Post on December 7, 1916, and was featured on the front page of the New York Times a few days later.

However, the name change was not forwarded to and memorialized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (USBGN), part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, or the New York State Board on Geographic Names.

Through diligent work by Nancy Duff Campbell, a century later this error was yesterday rectified as a vote was taken by the Lewis Town Council in favor of the name change. Your blogger sent the following letter to the Lewis Town Council in advance of the meeting, and to the USBGN. That evening, the Lewis Town Board formally approved the name change. The last stop in the process will be at the USBGN.

October 8, 2019 

To the Lewis Town Council, Lewis, NY 

Dear Supervisor Monty and the Lewis Town Council, 

This is to support renaming Mt. Discovery as Mt. Inez. 

I am a huge fan of Inez Milholland. She was married to the brother, Dutchman Eugen Boissevain of my grandmother (Olga Boissevain). My mother met Inez when Inez was first married in 1913 and the couple went to visit Eugen's relatives in Holland. My mother described Inez to me in great detail, how sweet-smelling she was and how she brought with her a gift of a Kewpie Doll (the doll with little wings in the back), which was the rage at the time. 

Inez proposed to Eugen on the Cunard ship Mauretania and they were married in the Kensington Town Hall in London on Bastille Day 1913. The idea was they wanted to go to Holland as a married couple, not just engaged. They were going to keep it a secret from Inez's father, John Milholland. By this time Inez was already a national figure, having led the suffrage parades in New York and Washington, DC. She was also well known in London as a disciple of the Pankhursts (she was proud to call herself a Suffragette, as the Pankhurst followers did, not just a suffragist). 

So the attempt to keep the wedding a secret was futile. It was featured on the front page of all the newspapers and that's where John E. Milholland read about it in the New York Times the next day. He wanted Inez to marry Guglielmo Marconi, the radio guy, who actually proposed to Inez on another Cunard ship when Inez was not yet in college. Inez accepted, but Marconi's Irish mother (a cousin of Eugen's Irish mother) was distressed that Inez would go to the United States and talked her son out of it. Inez later said she loved the radio but didn't want to marry it. 

In an effort to keep the memory of Inez memory alive, I wrote a play about her that was produced as a staged reading in the Lewis church where she is buried (it was also staged in six other locations). I maintain a website about her, www.inezmb.blogspot.com. I was the secretary and organizer of a national committee to pay for the restoration of the iconic painting of Inez that hangs in the Belmont-Paul building next to the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington (https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2010/04/inez-milholland-portrait-restoration-planned.html. The Committee was headed by  members of the Boissevain (especially Al Boissevain, Eugen's nephew) and Milholland families and included Margaret Gibbs of the Essex County Historical Society. The painting was restored to the highest standards. 

A century ago, the Lewis Town Council reportedly decided to rename the mountain. It's not too late to make good on the promise. The world owns the memory of Inez Milholland, but only Lewis owns her gravesite and the mountain that your predecessors in office promised to rename in her honor. As the logline of a recent movie, "The Silent Soldier and the Portrait," puts it, "If the Universe offers you a second chance, take it."

John

John Tepper Marlin, Ph.D. (teppermarlin at aol dot com)