BIRTH | Aug. 6–Inez Milholland is 130 (Updated Aug. 25, 2016)

Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916)

This day in 1886, in Brooklyn, N.Y., was born Inez Milholland Boissevain, who gave her life working to persuade President Wilson to support a U.S. constitutional amendment recognizing the right of women to vote.

Women won the right to vote at the Federal level in 1920, four years after she died.

Milholland was a graduate of Vassar College and NYU Law School who also fought for the rights of working-class women, spoke out for racial equality, and worked for prison reform.

At Vassar, her suffrage meetings were banned from the campus, so she held them across the street at a Poughkeepsie Cemetery.

For six years, she was involved in the drive for Votes for Women in New York, memorably lobbying state lawmakers and leading annual suffrage parades up Fifth Avenue.

In 1913, she fought for the inclusion of black college women in the Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., and she famously led it the wearing a cape and crown atop a white horse.

Inez and Eugen Boissevain, 1913

In July 1913, she married Eugen Boissevain (my mother's uncle) in London, asking her friends to keep it a secret. However, someone called the newspapers and it was front-page news the next day. A New York Times editorial called her "the fairest of the Amazons".

In 1916, she became a “Flying Envoy” on a speaking tour of the western states on behalf of the National Woman's Party. In October 1916, after the rhetorical question, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty,” she collapsed before a large audience in Los Angeles, Calif. She died a month later of pernicious anemia.

On Christmas Day, an unprecedented memorial was held for her in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the first woman to be honored there.

The following  month, suffragists from the National Woman's Party presenting memorials of Milholland's death were rebuffed by President Wilson. They then began picketing the White House and carried her last words on many of their banners. The picketing led to arrests, imprisonment, hunger strikes, forced feeding, national outrage and a change in President Wilson's mind (not his first). The 19th Amendment was ratified by the last required state (Tennessee) in August 1920.

Inez Milholland Boissevain personified the goal of Votes for Women.

INEZ | Mar. 25–Triangle Fire, 105th Anniversary

Site of the Triangle Fire.

March 25, 2016–The Triangle Fire occurred next door to the NYU Law School, which was then located to the east of Washington Square Park close to the center of the eastern border of the park. 

Just 18 months before, in September 1909, the 250+ teenage girls who worked at the Triangle workers went out together on strike and were joined by nearly 20,000 other workers on a strike that lasted 13 weeks. 

NYU law student Inez Milholland joined the strikers and was arrested along with them. Some companies settled, but the Triangle owners refused to make any concessions. 

One requested concession was that doors not be locked (see Joan Dash, We Will Not Be Moved: The Women's Factory Strike of 1909, Scholastic Books, 1996, p. 140). 

On March 25, a fire took the lives of 146 workers, mostly young girls, who could not exit the locked doors. Most chose to jump to their deaths from windows, or into elevator shafts, rather than wait to be burned alive. 

This fire led to new labor laws in New York State, to FDR's appointment as Labor Commissioner when he became Governor, and then to her appointment in 1933 by the incoming president, FDR, as Secretary of Labor and the first female Cabinet member in history, serving throughout the next 12 years. More on the fire.

Sources

Dash, Joan. We Will Not Be Moved: The Women's Factory Strike of 1909, Scholastic Books, 1996.

See also prior post in 2014.