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 | Graveyard Meeting, June 1908

Graveyard where Vassar suffragists met. Photo from the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Newsletter.

When Inez Milholland was a student at Vassar, she requested use of the Vassar chapel for a suffrage meeting.

But President James Monroe Taylor forbade it. So the meeting was held at a public graveyard across the street from Vassar.

Taylor was outraged at the "exploitation" of Vassar for political purposes and said he would expel any student who attended.

But word got out and the meeting on June 8, 1908 attracted about 40 Vassar undergraduates, ten alumnae, Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter) - who was organizing the event as part of a trolley ride down the East Coast - and others from outside the Vassar community including two men.

This meeting established the Vassar Votes for Women Club, which continued to meet off-campus under Milholland's leadership.

Her opening remarks at this meeting were in part: "How can we enjoy a comfortable life when young girls are chained to their machines in factories? Sisterhood with other women is more important to me than a Vassar diploma. . . . Only when women vote, will they breathe free." Source:  Boissevain Family Website.

INEZ | Oct. 21–Forward into Light / Edison Gets Bulb Right

Edison's new bulb.

October 21, 2013 – Today in 1879 Thomas Edison figured out how to make a better electric light bulb, initiating wonderment that produced, among other things, the battle cry for Votes for Women: "Forward into Light."

Since the 1820s, scientists knew that electricity could replace kerosene and gas lamps, but inventors only knew that platinum worked as a filament. Edison discovered that carbonized cotton thread worked better (tungsten turned out later to be even better).

He created the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1880 to enable him to bring electricity into people’s homes and businesses like gas and water, under the streets.

Once installation of cables was under way in Manhattan, he invented all the fixtures, sockets, fuses, and meters and then formed manufacturing companies to supply them. Edison's first commercial power plant was in lower Manhattan, at 257 Pearl Street. He needed a densely populated area full of both businesses and residential customers. The area's proximity to financial backers on Wall Street was also helpful. On the day, September 4, 1882, when the Pearl Street Station powered up for the first time, Edison was standing in the offices of investor J.P. Morgan. Edison gave the signal to his chief electrician, who closed the circuit and began the first commercial delivery of electric power. The New York Times, an early customer – reported the next day:

Edison’s central station, at No. 257 Pearl street, was yesterday one of the busiest places down town, and Mr. Edison was by far the busiest man in the station. The giant dynamos were started up at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and, according to Mr. Edison, they will go on forever unless stopped by an earthquake. [...] The electric lamps in THE TIMES Building were as thoroughly tested last evening as any light could be tested in a single evening, and tested by men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp, and the decision was unanimously in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas.

The new light bulb played several parts in the life of Inez Milholland Boissevain:

• Her father and grandfather were involved in electric utilities in Essex County, NY, where she spent her summers at Meadowmount. The light bulb must have been helpful for growing that business.
• At Vassar, where Inez was in 1905-09, the campus was lit by Welsbach gaslights. These were changed over, slowly, to electric lights.
• Electric lighting came to be associated with enlightenment – a second Renaissance (or as Edna St Vincent Millay's poem spelled it, "Renascence").
• A theme song for the women's movement was "Forward into Light", which was set to music by Charles Ives.
• The banner that Inez Milholland Boissevain carries on horseback in her iconic post-mortem poster reads "Forward into Light".



The light bulb replaced this Welsbach-mantled gas light.

• Inez must have either sung the Ives song, or her sister Vida (who sang professionally for a while) did, at Vassar, and she picked up the theme as a feminist anthem.

The gas companies fought back against the view that gas lights were old-fashioned. They brought out new products and advertising designed to keep people using gas on the grounds of cost, tradition or simplicity.

Electric light did have a negative impact. It meant that people began to sleep less.

Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night.

By the end of the 20th century, average sleep time was reduced to more like seven and a half hours. Under laboratory conditions, people deprived of electric light revert to sleeping nine hours a night.