INEZ | What would she do? Write to the President?

If Inez Milholland Boissevain were alive today (she would be 130 years old), what would she recommend that organizers of The Women's March do now?

What They Did Then

Inez was pretty aggressive.

She was on the radical end (she pushed Alice Paul to let a black sorority participation in the 1913 "Procession" that she headed up on her horse) of the radical offshoot (what became the National Woman's Party) of the established women's group (the National American Woman Suffrage Association).

What they did in 1917, about seven weeks after Inez died, was to picket the White House, six days a week, until public opinion changed (especially after the DC police jailed women who were force-fed in prison).

Then Wilson changed his mind, supported a Federal Amendment giving women the vote. The 19th Amendment became law in 1920.

Today

I am pretty sure that Inez would be in the face of the President.

Diana Chapman Walsh, former President of Wellesley (and Wellesley '66 classmate of my wife Alice), has suggested a way to be in the President's face without everyone making another trip to Washington. 

She suggests that everyone who reads this send in Tuesday's mail a very simple hand-written message to President Trump regarding the preservation of the Affordable Care Act. She suggests the following short letter. Written letters to the President must be opened, read and tallied. If everyone responds, it will create a mountain of mail and create a visually undeniable citizens' demand.

President Donald J. Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington, D.C. 20500

“Don’t make America sick again. Improve Obamacare. Don’t repeal it.”

If 53 million pieces of mail go out that will mean about $25 million worth of postage stamps sold, which will help the solvency of the USPS.

I have done it and so has Alice.

INEZ | Fund-Raiser for Socialists, 1910-1922

Art Young (1866-1943)

I have just been reading Art Young's long and interesting first (1928) autobiography, My Life and Times, available online (http://bit.ly/2jSuoeO – the download is slow because the file is large).

It reveals the important and inadequately remembered role that Inez Milholland, daughter and then wife of business entrepreneurs, played as a go-between for the funding of socialist publications in the 1910-1916 period.

Her fundraising continued until her death in 1916 and her influence continued thereafter through her widower Eugen Boissevain, who after her death became highly successful, with two of his five brothers, importing coffee from Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies.

The socialist publications in the 1911-1922 period coincided with the creation of the traditions and energy that emanated for the rest of the century from Greenwich Village.

These traditions were also wrapped up with the energy of New York University. Inez Milholland attended NYU Law School – and thereby became part of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company strike in 1909 and a witness to the fire in 1911 – because her application to Harvard Law School was rejected. The Harvard Law School faculty decided she could do the work, but the administration did not admit women for another four decades–not until 1950.

1. The Masses, 1911-17

Art Young shows how The Masses got started with a $2,000 contribution (equal to about $50,000 today) from Alva Belmont, whose support was enlisted by Inez. Max Eastman hadn't thought of approaching her, because he knew that Alva wasn't  a socialist. But Inez knew that she was a supporter of suffragist causes and correctly perceived that she would be open to supporting other issues if properly presented. (See Young, previously cited 1928 Autobiography, p. 297.)

Inez explained to him that Alva was a "militant" – which would be enough for her to want to enable militancy of other kinds.

Alva's gift was quickly matched by $1,000 from popular novelist John Fox and then another $2,000 from civil rights lawyer Amos Pinchot. That was sufficient to get the magazine under way. Belmont made subsequent contributions.

The magazine was ended when Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General invoked wartime laws against sedition and refused to mail it. The magazine was succeeded by another one led by Max Eastman, The Liberator, and later by The New Masses.

2. Good Morning, 1919-22

Cartoonist Art Young, a mainstay of The Masses, created his own magazine in 1919. He needed $4,500 to get it going, and received $1,000 of it (equal to about $25,000 today according to the BLS inflation calculator) from Inez's widower Eugen Boissevain. Eugen asked Art: "Are you sure this is enough?" (See his previously cited 1928 autobiography, p. 356.)

Art's magazine competed with Max Eastman's new magazine The Liberator. It only lasted three years. The value of these magazines is that they show an alternative point of view to the prevailing mood of capitalist acquisitiveness that lasted until FDR's election in 1932.

3. John Reed's Trip to Russia

Eugen Boissevain is credited by Max Eastman in his book Great Companions with contributing and raising the money that John Reed needed to go to Russia and write the book that became Seven Days that Shook the World.

DUTCH FEMINIST | Rosa Manus Remembered

Rosa Manus (1881-1942)

Charles Leidschendam Boissevain just wrote to me about a lecture this past week about Dutch feminist Rosette Susanna ("Rosa") Manus. The lecture was by  Prof. Francisca de Haan, who edited with Myriam Everard a 700-page biography of Manus with multiple authors of specialized chapters. A 16-page report on the book – in English! 😗👍 – is available here.

In her lecture at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, Prof. de Haan argues that Manus is at least as important to the women’s movement as Aletta Jacobs, after whom a foundation is named. 

There are several connections between Manus and American suffragist Inez Milholland Boissevain. Manus:

• Was, like Inez, active in the movements for both women's rights and peace.
• Organized in 1913 an important first World Congress on women's emancipation and world peace. That was the same year as the January march in Washington led by Inez on horseback. 
• Worked on women's issues with Dr. Mia (Maria) Boissevain (1878-1959). Mia is mentioned on p. 13 of the report cited in the first paragraph above. Mia's husband Robert was the nephew of Eugen Boissevain, who married Inez Milholland in July 1913.
• Was arrested by the Nazis the year after they invaded Holland, and was killed by them in 1942 in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. Mia's husband Robert was also killed by the Nazis by starvation and disease in another concentration camp. Mia and Robert, and their children including Charles, are included by Israel's Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations.

The new biography was published in Leiden in 2016 by Brill Publishers, which has been around since 1683. It is publicized by Atria, an Amsterdam nonprofit that works for a gender equality agenda. Atria's newest project is a Wiki-writing workshop on the 3rd Friday of every month to equalize the number of articles on women in Wikipedia.  One of their topics to cover is the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, in which Eugen Boissevain played a role along with his friend Max Eastman and Inez Milholland's father John E. Milholland. The director of Atria is Renée Römkens. 

References:

Atria, Netherlands Institute for Gender Equality and Women's History, Vijzelstraat 20,

1017 HK Amsterdam. info@atria.nl. Also:

• Streets of Amsterdam (AT5) on Rosa Manus, January 9, 2017

• Amsterdam: Rosa Manus was more important than Aletta Jacobs, AD and Het Parool, December 14, 2016

INEZ | Sister March, Jan. 21, in Lewis, N.Y.

The following is from a press release sent out by Sandra Weber.

Sister March Planned to Honor Inez Milholland 

Adirondack-Champlain Valley community will rally at suffragist’s grave

Elizabethtown, NY, January 9, 2017—Women, men, families and youths from across the Adirondack region plan to rally on Saturday, January 21 to show solidarity with those at the Women’s March on Washington. Local marches have been gathering momentum and the national organization says 300 Sister Marches are planned, each with its own program, “from music and speeches to a rally at a suffragist’s grave in upstate New York, to a verbal ‘human mosaic’ of people in Napa Valley sharing their vision for the future.” [See prnewswire on Sister Marches, 1/9/17]

“The day after the Presidential inauguration, people from around the country will unite in Washington, DC in the spirit of democracy, dignity and justice,” said Sandra Weber, co-organizer of the Adirondack march. “Some people are travelling to DC, but many of us will not be able to make the trip. When I heard that Seneca Falls was holding a Sister March, I thought it was a great idea for our North Country community to join the movement.”

Participants in the Adirondack-Champlain Valley Women’s March will meet at the grave of Inez Milholland in Lewis Cemetery behind the Congregational Church. The program will include a tribute to Inez, presentation of flowers, and a reading of the sonnet "To Inez Milholland" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The cemetery setting also echoes the famous “graveyard rally” organized by Inez when Vassar College officials refused to allow a suffrage meeting on campus. 

“In the Adirondack region, the most notable site of the woman’s movement is Inez’s grave. She rode a white horse at the front of the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington and became the national symbol of the suffrage movement,” explained Weber, a local author and historian. “Three years later, Inez Milholland died, at age 30, while campaigning for Votes for Women. Her father, John Milholland (one of the founders of the NAACP), insisted that the body be buried in the Adirondack foothills, near the family’s estate, Meadowmount.”

“Inez was not only a suffrage martyr, she was an advocate of human rights,” said David Hodges, co-organizer of the local event. “Her message---Forward out of darkness, Forward into light---resonates as much today as 100 years ago.”

In recognition of her sacrifice and commitment to women’s equality, Inez Milholland was nominated for the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2015. The Inez Milholland Centennial project believes that now is the perfect time to award the medal to Inez, as women march in Washington following in her footsteps and others rally at her grave.

After the short graveside ceremony, the Adirondack marchers will reconvene indoors at the Whallonsburg Grange where Hodges, along with other musicians and singers, will lead participants in songs of hope and unity. The purpose is to stand together and send a message of support for values of human decency, equal rights and freedom from discrimination. 

During the first ten days of the grass-roots effort using Facebook and e-mail, fifty people committed to attending the Adirondack-Champlain Valley Women’s March. Participants are coming from all over the region: Keene Valley, Essex, Westport, Elizabethtown, Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Plattsburgh, Glens Falls, and Vergennes, Vermont, and other places.

The event is free and non-partisan. For more information, see the Facebook Event page for Adirondack – Champlain Valley Women’s March or email Sandra Weber at weber@sandraweber.com.

For more information on the Sister March Press Release: https://www.womensmarch.com/sisters-press

For more information on the Women’s March on Washington and Sister Marches, visit womensmarch.com or womensmarch.com/sisters

Additional photos available from Sandra Weber, 518-873-1137 . weber@sandraweber.com.

INEZ | 100th Anniversary of Christmas Memorial

Inez Milholland Boissevain preparing to lead the March 3, 1913, women’s suffrage 

         parade in Washington, D.C.                                                              Library of Congress

[The following appears in the East Hampton Star dated yesterday and delivered this morning, Dec. 23.]

A Suffragist Warrior, by John Tepper Marlin

 December 22, 2016

Christmas Day this year will be the 100th anniversary of a huge memorial service on Capitol Hill for Inez Milholland Boissevain, a New Yorker who died on Nov. 25, 1916. Her death played a crucial role in the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. 

Inez was the probably the most famous American feminist alive in 1916. She led the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. Later that year she secretly married Eugen Boissevain, who was my mother’s uncle. It was front-page news all over the United States because feminism and marriage were then considered incompatible. The New York Times described Inez as “the fairest of the Amazons.”

She died weeks after collapsing in Los Angeles during a speech urging a vote against the re-election of President Woodrow Wilson because he opposed women’s suffrage and what was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Her shocking death sparked hundreds of tributes and memorials around the country. The huge Christmas Day funeral service in the Hall of Heroes led to a White House meeting of members of the National Woman’s Party with President Wilson to urge him — in memory of Inez — to support the constitutional amendment recognizing the right of women to vote. 

Wilson’s response to the delegation was condescending. He explained that it was impossible for him to hold together the southern wing of the Democratic Party if he championed a federal amendment, as they would have known if they had done their political homework. The fuming delegation went back across Lafayette Square to the Woman’s Party headquarters and decided to picket the White House every day until Wilson changed his mind.

The picketers were in due course arrested and transported to the Occoquan Women’s Workhouse in Lorton, Va. They promptly went on a hunger strike and were force-fed like geese. When descriptions of this torture were smuggled out of the workhouse, public opinion shifted decisively, and Wilson decided to support the 19th Amendment. It was passed by both houses of Congress and became law in 1920.

New Yorkers were prominent in the achievement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were from the Rochester area. Inez was Brooklyn-born and Vassar-educated. Her portrait on a horse has been hung over the mantelpiece in the National Woman’s Party headquarters in Washington for nearly a century. Money to support the party came from Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, whose castle at Sands Point on Long Island is widely viewed as the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” mansion.

One reason for Inez’s effectiveness was that she understood the media, as the daughter of a Lincoln Republican newspaper editor who in midcareer became wealthy by promoting underground tubes for the distribution of mail. Her father, an Irish Presbyterian, was the first treasurer of the N.A.A.C.P.

She championed the cause of the small upstart activist Delta sorority at Howard University to be represented in the women’s suffrage march when others in 1913 feared a backlash among whites in segregated Washington and the Southern states. I attended the 100th anniversary of that march three years ago. It attracted 5,000 Delta marchers from around the country, outnumbering by more than 10 to 1 representation by the traditional women’s organizations that existed in 1913.

In the wake of the defeat of the first female major-party presidential candidate in U.S. history in 2016, American women’s groups are organizing a Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21. The urgency and passion with which Inez and her colleagues in the National Woman’s Party pursued their cause turned around the media, the public, and then the president, in that order. Remembering how women succeeded in the years 1913 to 1920 and translating that to a radically transformed media environment might be useful for those planning the 2017 march.

© 2016 by John Tepper Marlin and The East Hampton Star.  To reprint email john@boissevainbooks.com.

---

John Tepper Marlin wrote a play about the women’s suffrage movement that was staged at Rochester’s Geva Theatre in 1998 and twice at the Springs Presbyterian Church in 2005. He has lived in Springs since 1981.

MILLAY | Edna's "Poem" after Eugen's Death

Edna and Eugen at sea, c. 1923.

My research on the Boissevain family proceeds slowly in part because of the language barrier. Much of the record is in Dutch. 

Here is a note from Engelien de Booij to her cousin Hilda van Stockum that is notable because it mentions a "poem" by Millay about Eugen after his death (she lived on after him for a little more than a year). I

t also shows that the flow of information from Engelien to me was often via HvS and in Dutch. After Engelien's death I was given documents by her cousin and executor that Engelien had left for me. As she promised in the note below, she did several translations of letters, mostly  from Willem van Stockum to his mother. She had been working on them in the months before she died.

The following is my transcription of Engelien's hand-written letter and my translation based on Google Translate and the Hippocrene Standard Dutch-English Dictionary. 

BRIEF VAN ENGELIEN

Bilthoven, October 21, 1998. 

Lieve Hilda, 
ik ontdekke dat ik Edna’s gedicht dat zij ha Eugen’s dood schreef, toch hier had – ik had het overgedreven uit moeder's gedichtenverzameling en zend het je hierbij (copie) voor John, misschien kent hij dit niet. Ik vind het nog altijd heel ontroerend, maar misschien lees jij het met anderen ogen? Over een paar maanden hoop ik de andere strikken voor John op te diepen. Heel veel lief. Engelien.

LETTER FROM ENGELIEN 

Bilthoven, October 21, 1998.

Dear Hilda [van Stockum], 
I discovered I still had here Edna's poem that she wrote after Eugen's death – I had transferred it from mother's [Hilda de Booij's] poem collection and send it to you here (copy) for John [Tepper Marlin], maybe he does not have it. I still find it very moving, but maybe you read it with others' eyes? In a few months I hope to unearth the other pieces for John. Lots of love. Engelien.

What is this "poem" that Edna wrote after Eugen's death? Three possibilities:

1. It may be the "penciled draft of a poem" – of which only the last three lines are cited in both Nancy Milford's biography (Chapter 40), Savage Beauty, and Daniel Mark Epstein's What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: 

I will control myself, or go inside. / I will not flaw perfection with my grief. / Handsome this day: no matter who has died.

These three lines were circled, says Milford, in a notebook found near a bloodstain on the Millay landing. This is the only poetry in Milford's book that might be construed as an epitaphic poem to Eugen. Neither biography includes the rest of the poem. 

2. The two lines that I have cited elsewhere, not in either biography.

The only thing I ever did for you was survive you. / But that was much. 

3. A third poem. 

I'm still looking. 

BOISSEVAIN | No Regret

The Boissevain Coat of Arms

The Boissevain coat of arms includes the motto – Ni regret du passé ni peur de l'avenir.  "No regret for the past, no fear of the future."  The motto is in French because the family originated in France and migrated to Holland.

My grandmother, born Olga Boissevain, was extremely proud of her family. I was prompted to remember her family motto when during my end-of-year cleanup of our apartment I came across a book called Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda by Dr. Arthur Freeman and Rose DeWolf (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990).

It struck a bell. The subtitle is: Overcoming Regrets, Mistakes, and Missed Opportunities. The thesis is that people can be prisoners of their regrets and that their focus should be on the future. The past is over, we start from where we are.

Economists call this "path dependence". Economies and people develop from where they are, not where we would prefer them to have started. It's like the person giving directions to your hotel who says: "You really shouldn't be starting from here."

Two sections of Chapter One lay out the general advice:

• "Why" Is Not Important
•  What Next, Not Why.

Lucy is in a box of her own
making.

The authors make clear that following their advice is not so easy as it might seem. You can't "just forget" something that you have decided was unfair or a mistake in your life. They suggest that you "change your mood" rather than try to "forget" something. The more we try to forget something, the more we may remember it. Don't try to substitute a vacuum for a negative thought. Instead, substitute a positive thought or at least something that will crowd out the negative thought.

One handy technique ... for interrupting the constant repetition of an unwanted thought is call thought-stopping. It means consciously replacing one set of thoughts with another. ... For example: The next time you find yourself saying, "If only..." start counting by thirteens. ... "[T]hirteen, twenty-six... and thirteen more is thirty-nine, and thirteen more is ..." ... You will find that it is not only difficult to count by thirteen, but it is practically impossible to do that and think about anything else at the same time. (p. 107)

The rest of the book is about goal-setting and the terrible "shoulds", the common disablers. There are chapters on:

• The urge to get even
• Comparing yourself to others
• Lost loves and wrong lovers
• Procrastination
• Them – resisting pressure from others

I found that it all deepened my understanding of the family motto.