Inez Milholland

1886-1916

Inez Milholland came from a wealthy Brooklyn family. While at Vassar College, she was briefly suspended for organizing a women's rights meeting because Vassar didn't allow that kind of thing even though it was officially a college for women. After graduation she applied to law school at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, but she was turned down because none of them accepted women. Eventually she got her law degree at New York University.

July 1913 while on a cruise to London, Milholland proposed to Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutchman she had known for about a month. They married at the London registry office soon after landing. Upon returning to New York, she discovered she was no longer an American citizen because the law said that a woman took her husband's nationality.[*Footnote]

*Footnote: This is a small example of coverture, the legal concept that a wife's legal existence was merged with that of her husband. That part of the law was changed by the Cable Act of 1920 (Married Women's Independent Nationality Act), so Mr. Boissevain's next wife, Edna St Vincent Millay, kept her American citizenship.

On the day before Woodrow Wilson's innauguration in March 1913, thousands of suffragists staged the massive Woman Suffrage Procession down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to protest women's exclusion from government, and Milholland had the honor of leading the parade on a white horse in white robes like a classical goddess.

She was knee-deep in all the Leftie causes at the time. At Vassar she headed the student socialists. She was on Henry Ford's peace ship to Europe during WW1. She was a founder of the NAACP.

She died of pernicious anemia in Los Angeles while on a speaking tour of the West.

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