Inez Milholland Boissevain
Inez Milholland Boissevain was a prominent American suffragist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1886. As the daughter of a reporter and advocate for women's rights, she was deeply influenced by her family's commitment to reform causes. Milholland was well-educated, attending several prestigious institutions, including Vassar College and New York University, where she earned her law degree. She actively participated in the women's suffrage movement, joining the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women and advocating for labor rights.
Known for her charisma and public speaking skills, she famously led a women's parade in Washington, D.C., on horseback, earning the nickname "America's Joan of Arc." Her activism extended to various social causes, including child care and racial equality, as she was involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other organizations. Tragically, her life was cut short when she died at the age of 30 due to pernicious anemia. Milholland's legacy endures, with her contributions to the suffrage movement and social justice recognized in various commemorations, including the renaming of a mountain in her honor.
Subject Terms
Inez Milholland Boissevain
- Inez Boissevain
- Born: August 6, 1886
- Died: November 25, 1916
Suffragist, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the first daughter and first of three children of John Elmer Milholland, a son of Irish immigrants, and Jean (Torrey) Milholland, of Scottish descent. John Milholland, a reporter and writer for The New York Tribune and a staunch Republican, supported many reform causes, including woman suffrage. He also invented a pneumatic mail-delivery system that was successfully employed both in the United States and abroad.
Inez Milholland was educated at the Comstock School in New York, Kensington High School in London, the Willard School in Berlin, and Vassar College (1905-09). She then entered law school at New York University, one of the few major law schools that then admitted women, receiving her LL.B. in 1912. She joined a New York law firm and worked on criminal and divorce cases.
Even as a Vassar student she had become active in furthering women’s rights. As a lawyer she joined the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later called the Women’s Political Union, founded in 1907 by Harriot Stanton Blatch. The league, which enlisted support from both middle- and working-class women, used public rallies and legislative testimony to revive the faltering suffrage movement. Milholland was one of those who was frequently called to give testimony before legislative bodies.
She was also a strong supporter of organized labor. In the shirtwaist and laundry workers’ strike of 1910, she raised money and gave free legal counsel. She became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Child Care Committee, the Women’s Trade Union League, and, as an avowed Socialist, the Fabian Society of England.
Participation in these activities brought her into contact with many of the radicals, intellectuals, and artistic figures who populated New York City’s Greenwich Village in the teens and twenties. Possessing a flair for publicity, she led a women’s parade in Washington, mounted on a white horse, and became known as “America’s Joan of Arc.” She developed a close friendship, later a romantic involvement, with Max Eastman, editor of the radical magazine The Masses. In 1913, when The Masses was indicted on a charge of libeling The Associated Press, Inez Milholland helped organize a defense committee that included Lincoln Steffens and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Shortly afterward she met Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch coffee importer and the son of an Amsterdam newspaper publisher. They were married in July 1913 and took a house in Har-mon-on-Hudson, New York. (After her death Eugen Boissevain married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.)
During World War I Inez Boissevain was a war correspondent, writing for pacifist publications. She sailed on Henry Ford’s Peace Ship in 1915 but returned to the United States criticizing the undemocratic method of selecting leaders.
Boissevain resumed her reform activities by helping in a garment workers’ strike. Her chief interest, however, was the effort to obtain the woman suffrage amendment to the Constitition. She joined the Congressional Union and its successor, the National Woman’s party.
In 1916 Boissevain began a speaking tour in the West, where the Woman’s party was concentrating its activities. In Los Angeles she collapsed and died of pernicious anemia; she was thirty years old. She was buried on her parents’ estate at Meadowmount, New York. In her honor the citizens of Elizabethtown, New York, changed the name of Mount Discovery, in the Adirondacks, to Mount Inez.
The best account of her brief life is in Notable American Women (1971), which provides a bibliography of sources. See also A. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1971); E. Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959); R. M. Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League and American Feminism,” Feminist Studies, Fall 1975; and the Dictionary of American Biography (1929). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, November 27, 1916.