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/

NY SUFFRAGE | Centennial, June-Nov 2017 (Updated Aug 7, 2017)

Historical marker of the home of May Groot
Manson, East Hampton suffragist. Unveiled,
 June 2017.

Women won the right to vote in New York State in November 1917.

That was three years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving women the vote in national elections.

Nationally, anti-suffragists warned that when a woman received the right to vote,

''Political gossip would cause her to neglect the home, forget to mend our clothes and burn the biscuits.''

New York State became a pivotal state in the national suffrage campaign. Women who had never dealt with larger units than missionary societies, literary clubs or cake sales were given territory with 16,000 or more voters and ordered to reach every one of these men.

Much of the activity centered on New York City, which was the home of suffragist leaders like Inez Milholland, Crystal Eastman, Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont.

Marker. Photo by JT Marlin, June 25, 2017.

East Hampton in August 1913 was the site of a suffrage rally, starting in front of the home of suffrage leader May Groot Manson on Main Street, across from First Presbyterian Church of East Hampton.

Westchester County was a hotbed of suffrage activists, who enrolled 20,000 women in 102 suffragist clubs. The cause brought Social Register ("Blue Book") women together with women workers in trade unions and homemakers in modest homes to work under a common banner.

Westchester County's four Assembly Districts were led by a suffragist leader — Mrs. Arthur Livermore of Yonkers, Mrs. Leigh French of New Rochelle, Mrs. Marshall Backon of Tarrytown and Adelaide Goan of Katonah. The State League of Women Voters was opened to male members, and men composed about 10 percent of the county group.

New Rochelle was the home of Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association. Following the state success in passing votes for women in 1917, Mrs. Catt organized the New York State League of Women Voters, saying:

''What are we going to do? We know nothing about politics. We've got the vote. Now we must learn to use it.''

Famed Portrait by Sargent of May
Groot Manson. It was a house gift
 from the painter.

Scarborough was home to Narcissa Cox Vanderlip who became the first president of the Woman's Suffrage party (later called the New York State League of Women Voters). She agreed to organize volunteers to take a "military census" of able-bodied men in the county. She surveyed 320,000 residents and saved taxpayers thousands of dollars. The New York Sun said in 1917:

''One of the common reproaches against suffragettes is that they are not interested in anything but getting the vote. The Woman's Suffrage Party is disproving the accusation.''

White Plains was the site of a project begun by S. J. Russell, a leader of the White Plains suffrage association. In 1914, Russell organized a ''baby-checking'' service to encourage women to exercise the vote they had won in local town and village elections.

SUFFRAGE CENTENNIAL  EVENTS 2017

JUNE

June 29 (Thursday) One Woman, One Vote at the Adirondack History Museum, Lewis, Essex County, N.Y. Lewis is the birthplace of Inez Milholland.


JULY

New Yorker Inez Milholland Boissevain,
well portrayed in a reading of "Take Up
 the Song" at the Westwood  Country Club,
Vienna, Virginia in June. The black-tie
event raised $20,000 for the Turning
Point Suffrage Memorial.

July 4 (Tuesday), 10 a.m. Parade in Southampton. Parade forms at 9 a.m. Wear white, and “Votes for Women” sashes ($10 donation). To sign up, email Judi Roth at rothhandj@ yahoo.com or Arlene Hinkemeyer at ahinkemeyer@ optonline.net.

July 13 (Thursday), 11 a.m. Southampton Historical Museum and Rogers Memorial Library present Natalie Naylor’s PowerPoint talk on “Winning Votes for Women,” about L.I. suffrage leaders. Southampton Historical Museum, 17 Meeting House Lane. Dr. Naylor, a retired Hofstra professor, is president of the Nassau County Historical Society.

July 16 (Sunday). Afternoon Tea, Talk and Tour, celebrating Mary Louise Booth. Yaphank Historical Society, 469 Main Street, Yaphank, NY 11980, (631) 924-0146.

AUGUST 

August 24 (Thursday), 2-4 p.m. Re-creation of August 1913 suffrage rally in East Hampton, starting in front of the home of suffrage leader May Groot Manson on Main Street, across from First Presbyterian Church of East Hampton. Wear white or period dress, “Votes for Women” sashes, and choose to be one of the prominent women/men who marched in 1913 (names recorded in 1917 E.H. Star article). Rally ends with program and refreshments at E.H. Library. Buy your sash for $10 donation, email ahinkemeyer@optonline.net to sign up. Hamptons 100th Anniversary.

OCTOBER

October 19 (Thursday), 6 p.m. East Hampton Library, Tom Twomey Lecture Series, talk by Antonia Petrash and Arlene Hinkemeyer, on Long Island and South Fork suffrage leaders. Moderated by Judith Hope, hosted by Brooke Kroeger. Includes historical exhibit, student presentation, and reception.

October 21 (Saturday), 12 Noon. Rally at the Nassau County Legislative Bldg.

NOVEMBER

November 4 Votes for Women exhibition opens at The New York State Museum in Albany, NY. The six-panel traveling exhibition will be on view at venues throughout NY State: Albany City Hall, Clinton Historical Society, Cortland County Historical Society, Eastville Community Historical Society, Geneva Historical Society, Katonah Village Library, Lorenzo State Historic Site, National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House, New York State Fair, Niagara County Historical Society, The History Center, and the Seneca Falls Historical Society

November 19 (Sunday), 3 p.m. Rogers Memorial Library, Southampton Historical Museum and SAC, a Suffrage Musical Revue!, directed by Valerie di Lorenzo, at Southampton Arts Center, 25 Jobs Lane, refreshments, $10.

Sources: http://suffragecentennials.com, http://longislandwomansuffrage.com. The New York Times, 1917. The New York Sun, April 29, 1917

Related Posts on Inez Milholland. Her Engagement to Guglielmo Marconi . Short Biopic on Inez .  June 11 Play Featuring Inez Milholland . Edna St Vincent Millay  Centennial of Christmas Day Memorial to Inez . Seneca Falls Convention . The 1913 and 2013 Marches on Washington .  Inez Led the 1913 Parade . Eugen Boissevain, Tough and Tender

INEZ | Famed Parade Leader Forgotten

This iconic poster is based on the painting that
hangs in the lobby of the Sewall-Belmont
House in Washington next the Hart Senate
Office Building, was above the mantelpiece. 

February 28, 1913–The Washington Post yesterday, has a story on Inez Milholland from the perspective of the great contrast between her huge contemporary fame and the memory of her contribution to woman suffrage. 

Inez, Suffragette

The story is well told by Lonnae O'Neal Parker, who correctly calls Inez a "suffragette". 

Among the comments (28 when I last looked, several of them mine), one said "suffragette" was the wrong word and "suffragist" was correct. But in fact "suffragette" was not a word that either Inez or Alice Paul shrunk from. It connotes a willingness to be active ("in your face" we might say today) in pursuit of Votes for Women.

Inez trained with the self-styled Pankhurst suffragettes in England, when her father John E. Milholland had a house in London while he tried to get business for his pneumatic tubes from the British Post Office. Alice Paul was also with the suffragettes in London when she was recruited to take over NAWSA's then-moribund Congressional Committee.

The suffragettes were not embarrassed by standing on street corners and shouting "Votes for Women." Dignified ladies preferred to work behind the scenes, but the suffragettes said they had waited long enough for this low-profile approach to bear fruit. They took to the streets.

The parade in Washington was organized by the Alice-Paul-run Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The Committee later broke away from NAWSA and became the independent National Woman's Party. 

Both groups played a part in obtaining votes for women and hostility between the groups is unfortunate and unnecessary.

The long-term lobbying of NAWSA was important, but the chain of causation that led to final passage of the 19th Amendment can only be traced via the National Woman's Party. 

The parade 100 years ago is what emboldened the radicals to break off and pursue their own attention-getting campaign. Google "Inez Milholland Boissevain" (her married name) and for a "forgotten woman" you will find a lot of gigabytes of information about her.

No Memorial to Inez

One of the commenters said that there should be a statue to Inez Milholland in Washington. Several people thought this was a great idea. It could be located in one of the squares along Massachusetts Avenue west of the Capitol, where it crosses the grid.

Stanton Square is the other direction, a few blocks east of the Capitol. The square itself is named after Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War during the Civil War. Maybe no one would object if the name of the square was shared between him and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The square was the location of the first campaign headquarters of two-term President Barack Obama.

The statue in Stanton Square is not of Stanton but rather of Nathanael Greene, a soldier in George Washington's army after whom is named Greensboro, NC–birthplace of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY). 

It is in good condition, i.e., not a candidate for rider replacement. But maybe the National Park Service could come up with a candidate for redeploying one of the many handsome warhorse statues in Washington, DC. They would need to find one where the horse is solid but the rider is worn out by rain, or is by a mediocre sculptor and does not have a family or an institution to object vociferously to replacing the rider.

Iron-Jawed Angels

Another commenter on the Washington Post story recommends the movie Iron-Jawed Angels, wthe première of which I saw in Philadelphia. It tells the 19th Amendment story from Alice Paul's point of view. Alice Paul was a behind-the-scenes organizer, and a good one. She knew that Inez Milholland was the perfect woman to put in front of the public as the figurehead of the parade of the National Woman's Party. Inez would capture the affection of both men and women. Inez was happy to play that role.

But when Inez got sick in 1916 on her national campaign with her sister Vida, she should have stopped. Instead, spurred on by Alice Paul, she carried on until her collapse and death. In the movie, Paul is stricken with remorse.

We need another movie, from the perspective of Inez Milholland and the inspiration she was for the rest of the woman's movement. It would be a more interesting movie! In Iron-Jawed Angels (2004), Inez was played by Julia Ormond, who was then 39, nine years older than Hilary Swank, who played Alice Paul. Actually, Inez was younger than Alice Paul, not to mention rated "the fairest of the Amazons" by The New York Times editors, who normally don't get into rating the fairness of women.

Picketing the White House 

The picketing of the White House in 1917, started because President Wilson dissed a delegation of women from the National Woman's Party who appealed to him with 250 memorials of inez Milholland Boissevain's death. The emotional reaction is hard to understand unless you appreciate the contrast between the affection people had for Inez and the President's ivory-tower lecture to the delegation on its ignorance of political reality.

The National Woman's Party was then across Lafayette Park. The angry, fuming women left the White House and immediately started picketing in front of the White House gates, calling themselves the Silent Sentinels. The ignorance of political reality was more on the President's side than on the side of the National Woman's Party.

This phase is called the Turning Point by the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial group, which wants to create a memorial to the suffragists at the Workhouse (prison) in Lorton, Virginia, where the women were brought when President Wilson signaled his impatience with the picketing. In prison, the women - including Inez's sister Vida Milholland - went on a hunger strike and were force-fed, and that is when the tide of public opinion turned in favor of the suffragists. In changing his mind, Wilson referred to the good work of women in the war effort, but when the 19th Amendment was passed the New York Times gave credit both to the good ladies of NAWSA and the more radical women (young and old) of the NWP, giving one the silver pen and the other the gold inkstand.

Remembering the 1913 Parade, 100 Years Later

The parade on Sunday is sponsored by Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority at Howard University. Back in 1913, when they asked the National Woman's Party if they could be in the parade, the initial response was that it would be awkward because the southern membership of NAWSA would be upset. 

Inez Milholland got wind of this and talked to Alice Paul about it and the sorority was allowed to march, but they were put safely towards the back of the parade. The National Woman's Party became very brave by 1917 but in 1913 they were just the Congressional Committee of NAWSA, which itself was a merger of two suffrage groups (NWSA and AWSA, if I remember correctly) that had split over tactics when it appeared that non-white men would be added to the electorate before white women. Former slave Frederick Douglass was a key advocate in 1848 for the first Women's Convention to go for votes for women. But when during the Civil War it came to a choice between enfranchising black men or white women, he could only go one way.