John and Jean Milholland raised their three children to be exactly who they wanted to be. The family frequently hopped from America to Europe and back again as their whims and business dealings required.
If you want to picture what life was like for the Milhollands in London, I like to think about the 1964 Disney classic Mary Poppins. (Possibly minus the magical chalk drawings and the talking parrot umbrella.)
Why does the Banks family need a nanny to begin with? George Banks is very busy at the bank, doing man work in a suit, and Winifred Banks is a suffragette, fighting for votes for women, which obviously occupied much of her time. In the movie, Mrs. Banks comes home with her Votes for Women sash, chattering excitedly about how one of her friends got hauled off to prison, while another chained herself to the wheels of the prime minister’s carriage, and wasn’t it just the most glorious meeting?
My favorite line from “Sister Suffragette”—perhaps one of the greatest lyrics written by the Sherman brothers and delivered perfectly by Glynis Johns—is, Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group, they’re rather stuuuuuuupid. The look on Johns’s face, with her huge doe eyes and her stilted vibrato, is priceless.
Inez became one of the most recognizable suffrage workers in U.S. history, garnering the kind of press usually reserved for celebrities in society at the time.
Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of the ideal woman at the turn of the century seemed to be modeled after Inez Milholland—a woman who was tall and slender but voluptuous, with flowing long hair and smooth skin.[5] A woman who was delicate in beauty but who enjoyed adventure. Women the world over strove for the Gibson aesthetic, much like women of the 1990s were propelled by the impossibly slim figure of Kate Moss, or later, the preternatural curves of Kim Kardashian.
Inez was always giving the press a new story. inez to organize labor strike. inez arrested on way to opera. inez drives suffrage workers in her car. Cars, of course, were new. But a car driven by a woman? So new it was difficult to imagine.
Every time Inez was in the press, she appeared in opposition to the patriarchy. “We have found that protestation did no good,” she once announced. “Friends, we must revolt!”[6] When you picture the height of the suffrage movement, of women marching in parades, of picketing and pamphleteering, picture Inez. Because while she was not the organizer of many of these events—those duties fell to people like Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul—the organizers wanted her there, out front, being photographed.
And though women like Milholland, Catt, and Paul did much for the cause of women’s suffrage, that advocacy didn’t extend to Black women, who were often intentionally excluded from the movement. One reason why so many people, particularly southern Democrats, opposed suffrage for women is because they knew it would give Black women the right to vote, and that, they just couldn’t abide. Giving them the right to vote would upset the entire power dynamic that the United States was founded upon, and the rock upon which it still rested: the supremacy of white men.
Many white women went along with it: suffrage was so important to them that they were willing to leave Black women behind in order to gain the right to vote for themselves. Because they knew that a huge part of the country’s opposition to their suffrage was opposition to Black women being enfranchised, white women were often willing to not just look the other way but to intentionally exclude Black women for the purposes of appeasing white men.
Black women were usually not allowed to march in suffrage parades, or they were relegated to the back, permitted to participate only after all the white women had their turn. Black women formed their own clubs, their own political action groups, and their own suffrage organizations. They weren’t quiet about wanting suffrage for themselves, suffrage for all, universal suffrage, even when white women were unwilling to go that far.
Many southerners saw the connections between the suffrage movement and the antislavery abolitionist movement and wanted nothing of it. But in order to succeed in their quest for voting rights, white women needed the support of southern leaders in Congress and in statehouses. Some even tried to entice southerners by essentially saying, “We know y’all don’t like the fact that Black men can vote, so why not mitigate the damage Black men are doing by giving white women the right to cast a ballot?” Susan B. Anthony famously once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” Suffrage newsletters assured white male voters that they would work to uphold poll taxes and literacy tests to keep the “wrong”—aka Black—women from voting.
Milholland was a member of the NAACP, and in some cases, she insisted that Black women be allowed to participate in suffrage events. She took on Black clients as a lawyer, although some records indicate that she fell into using racially derogatory language when speaking to a Black client.
According to historian Linda Lumsden, the New York Press proclaimed that Inez “was an ideal figure of a typical American woman,” which says much when you read between the lines. The ideal suffrage worker wasn’t elderly, she wasn’t a woman of color, and she didn’t have an ordinary appearance. “No suffrage parade was complete without Inez Milholland,” the New York Press said, noting that Inez was wearing a “tight-fitting white satin gown which clings to her with the same tenacity with which she clings to the suffrage cause.”[7] Even then, newspapers talked more about what women wore and how they looked more than what they had to say.
But Inez knew the power that her attractiveness gave her. She allowed people to envision how a woman might be feminine and think for herself. How she might be desired by men and cast a ballot. No longer was the Votes for Women message relegated to teetotaling scolds hell-bent on removing all fun from public life, as some men believed. Suffrage was now sexy.
Inez’s fame brought more attention to the suffrage movement than anything women of the previous six decades had done. She became so popular that she started getting fan mail from overseas with her picture pasted on the outside of the envelope and the words “New York USA.” No other address required.[8]
In May 1911, Fifth Avenue was jammed with one hundred fifty thousand onlookers, all there to watch as thousands of women paraded through the streets of New York demanding the right to vote. Inez was leading the way, carrying a large yellow banner emblazoned with:
Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward, through the darkness
Forward into light
Forward, Inez believed. She said, “Suffrage is a gift no one can confer—it is a right.”[9]
Inez’s most infamous appearance occurred in 1913, at the suffrage march planned for the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. Women intended to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, along the exact route Wilson would take after being sworn in.
Inez wore what can only be described as a Wonder Woman visits Lord of the Rings Rivendell elvish costume, eager to make the newspapers and draw attention to the cause of suffrage.
She had learned to ride horses at her family’s country property, so Inez confidently sat astride Grey Dawn—a towering, handsome white horse. Her riot of dark hair was emblazoned with a shining star, and her body was draped in a cape that was clearly meant to billow in the wind as she rode up the avenue, making for a dramatic photograph.
In a letter to her friend Lucy Burns, Inez described the costume she was going to be wearing at the parade as “something suggesting the free woman of the future, crowned with the star of hope, armed with the cross of mercy, circled with the blue mantle of freedom, breasted with the torch of knowledge, and carrying the trumpet which is to herald the dawn of a new day of heroic endeavor for womanhood.”[10]
Slowly the parade began, wending its way through the District of Columbia to culminate in a dramatic suffrage tableau on the steps of the Treasury. Inez rode ahead of a float laden with a gigantic placard that read: WE DEMAND AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES ENFRANCHISING THE WOMEN OF THIS COUNTRY.[11]
(If you’re wondering what a “suffrage tableau” is, look no further than the scene in The Music Man where the mayor’s wife, Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn, leads her friends, who are all dressed in Grecian costumes, through a series of elaborate poses. “One Grrrrrecian urn,” Eulalie trills, rolling her r’s. The women all stop, holding their pose, as though they were being featured on the side of a Greek vase. Then they begin moving again, shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle, until Eulalie says, “Two Grrrrrrrrecian urn.” The Music Man was set in 1912, and tableaus were a type of historical skit/reenactment. Strangely, they’ve fallen out of favor.)
The spectators of the 1913 parade, many of them men intent on maintaining the male-dominated power structure of society, began to heckle the marchers. It started slowly at first. A whistle here, a catcall there. They made fun of older women as they marched past, shouting, “We came to see chicks and not hens!” Egged on by their comrades, some men flicked lit cigarettes at the women, others spat. Then the crowd began to surge out of control.
Before she knew what was happening, Inez found herself hemmed in by the sea of angry spectators, men packed so tightly together around her that Grey Dawn couldn’t walk. It’s a testament to the horse and his rider that he didn’t spook, rear up, and take off, as he was surrounded by thousands of angry men who were furious that women were demanding what already rightfully belonged to them—equality and freedom.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” Inez shouted at them. To the police, who were sitting idly by, Inez yelled, “If you have a particle of backbone, you will come out here and help us to continue our parade instead of standing there and shouting at us!”[12]
But the crowd was too riled up, and the police were too late in trying to gain control of them. The United States Cavalry had to be called in, galloping from across the Potomac and directly into the unruly throngs. Spectators scattered, marchers fell, bloodstains bloomed across fresh white dresses. Ambulances wailed back and forth to the hospital nonstop for over six hours, transporting injured women. Helen Keller was so rattled and upset by the events that she was unable to appear as scheduled at the tableau.[13]
The next day, newspapers around the country published horrifying stories of violence and harassment at the hands of men who would deny women the vote. One of the organizers, Dora Lewis, said, “We were jostled, humiliated, insulted, and deprived of the right of protection. In our ranks were the foremost women of America, college women, social workers, lawyers, physicians, wives of Senators and Representatives, and all these were allowed to be insulted and their lives jeopardized by crowds of drunken men. The police would not even rope off the streets for us…the militiamen who were present along the route were all drunk.”[14] The granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton was hit by an intoxicated man while the nearby police did nothing. Another attempted to scale a float and throw a woman off it. Hundreds of demonstrating women had bruises creeping across their bodies and faces the next day. The only group that even attempted to help the marchers fend off the swarms were a troop of Boy Scouts.
After the parade, people immediately called for the chief of police to be fired. Newspapers ran images of what the crowds looked like during the suffrage parade compared to what they looked like the next day during the inaugural parade—in one, crowds clog the streets in chaos. In the other, the newly sworn in president is helped to proceed in an orderly fashion down the same road, the crowds standing neatly behind the lines set up by the police.
The Women’s Political Union, a suffrage group, sent a telegram to Woodrow Wilson that arrived shortly before his inauguration. It read: “As you ride today in comfort and safety to the Capitol to be inaugurated as the President of the people of the United States, we beg that you will not be unmindful that yesterday the government, which is supposed to exist for the good of all, left women, while passing in peaceful procession in their demand for political freedom, at the mercy of a howling mob on the very streets which are being at this moment sufficiently officered for the protection of men.”[15]
Congress held weeks of hearings afterward. The Senate later wrote in one of their reports about the suffrage parade:
It is unfortunate that a quiet, dignified parade, composed mostly of women, could not be held upon the best-known avenue in the Nation’s capital without interference or insult…. We cannot condemn too strongly the conduct of those who thus interfered with the parade and jeered at the marchers. We regret that the parade was not fully protected…. Some of the uniformed and more of the special police acted with apparent indifference and in this way encouraged the crowd to press in upon the parade. These made little attempt to control or check the crowd, and in some instances, must have observed acts and conduct which should have called forth stern measures on their part, without doing anything to prevent the same.[16]
Inez Milholland was one tens of thousands of women who worked for seventy years to gain the right to vote. She wasn’t one of the women, like Alice Paul, who spent months in jail strapped to a chair with a tube shoved down her throat being force-fed out of her hunger strike. She wasn’t the brains behind the “Winning Strategy” of Carrie Chapman Catt, who would go on to found the League of Women Voters in 1920. You may think Inez was the pretty face of an often rugged movement, but in the coming years she would face a gruesome trial for the cause to which she was ready to give her entire life.
Ten
Maria de LopezCalifornia, 1911
