The Deseret News reported that the convention’s attendees had a motto of “Duty first! Duty to other women; duty to the many millions living in the slave states.”[6]
For the first time in history, women had organized themselves into a political force to be reckoned with. A new battalion was assembling at the edge of the battlefield for equal rights. But before the year was out, Inez Milholland, who had survived a violent mob in Washington, D.C., would be a martyr for the cause.
Leader Alice Paul planned a speaking tour, one that would take suffrage workers on an ambitious journey across the western states in October 1916, just before the presidential election where they hoped to unseat Woodrow Wilson. Inez Milholland Boissevain, one of the most popular speakers in the party’s arsenal, reluctantly agreed to headline the tour. She had been feeling ill for some time, so her little sister, Vida, agreed to come along for emotional and physical support. Vida would help make sure Inez slept and ate, that her clothing was organized, and that everything was in order on each stop from Kansas to California.
But no matter how much she slept, Inez never felt rested. Her throat was on fire. Her neck hurt whenever she moved her head. When she and her sister boarded the train for the first eighteen-hour leg of their journey, Inez hoped to wake up at the first tour stop refreshed. Instead, she was worse. The sisters sent for a doctor. After examining her, the doctor told Inez that her tonsils were infected, and had been for some time, which was probably why she felt so run down—her body was trying to fight the infection. Aside from that, the doctor said, Inez was as healthy as a horse. As soon as possible, he said, you will need to get your tonsils removed. But in the meantime, he said, “Here, take these,” handing her strychnine and arsenic pills, common (though deadly) treatments for infection in the decades before penicillin.[7]
Privately, Inez struggled with depression. Her career in the law had languished. The child she yearned for didn’t appear. But forward she forged, adrenaline allowing her to dazzle onstage and then collapse into bed afterward. Vida was a classically trained singer, and she entertained audiences with her voice while waiting for Inez to take the stage, sometimes in a large hall, sometimes at an intimate ladies’ tea, and sometimes on the back terrace of a train car. “After each meeting,” Vida said, Inez “wilted and looked like a ghost.”[8]
But before every event, Inez would rally. Newspapers described her delivery as having a “dramatic charm,” and that what she had to say was “fearlessly expressed.”[9] Another noted that she was “as beautiful as her pictures promised,” and that her personality was “magnetic.”[10]
At one speech in Boise, Inez shouted, “What is your answer, women with the ballot? Are you going to lick the hand that smites you like the hounds?” And, “Women should assert their power. If women don’t respect themselves, no one else will.”[11]
Rebecca Mitchell had been dead for eight years. But Inez’s position on that stage, encouraging enfranchised women—like the women of Idaho—to set aside their party preference and vote in the best interest of women nationwide? That was only possible because of the decades of labor that Mitchell and women like her put in, the path that was cleared for the people who came behind.
“It is women for women now, and shall be until the fight is won!” Inez declared. “How can our nation be free with half of its citizens mute and unadvised? In union alone is strength!”[12] Inez rallied her listeners, bringing them what she felt was a message of hope.
Some trains didn’t depart until 2:00 a.m., and some arrived at 5:00 a.m. The lack of consistent rest, the strain of being in the public eye, of having to look and speak the part at all times, contributed to Inez’s malaise. “We travel every night, get up early every morning, and keep on the go all day,” Inez remarked to a dinner guest in Multnomah, Oregon. “I cannot see how I can keep going, but I just have to.”[13]
Inez thought of the tens of thousands of women who were waiting for her at the coming stops. She thought of her own family and friends in New York who could not vote yet. In fact, Inez herself could not yet vote. She thought of the all the Black women in the South who would never be granted the right to vote from their state because of racial prejudice. Inez insisted on pressing forward. She had come too far to turn back now. Forward.
By the time they arrived in Montana, Inez had a fever. She glittered on stage, with The Butte Daily Post reporting that her “personality…[was] no less striking than her personal beauty.” She told her audience, “Our self-respect as suffragists demands that we repudiate the political party that has consistently ignored the claims of women.”[14] But in private, her head “had on a tight iron cup of pain,” her throat hurt so badly it was nearly all she could think about, and she was so weak she could only stand with assistance. They summoned another doctor. This one prescribed strong coffee and more strychnine.[15]
Strychnine is used today as rat poison. It’s a neurotoxin, and works by binding to receptors on nerve cells, which then makes them more susceptible to stimulation with lower levels of neurotransmitters. It was used medicinally at the time as a stimulant, which is why doctors would have prescribed it to Inez, whose stamina and energy were flagging. One small problem with strychnine: it is deadly at even a very low dose, and the difference between a medicinally effective dose and a deadly dose is tiny. The muscles you use to breathe can contract so strongly that they suffocate you to death.
The grueling tour continued on, but Inez’s spirits were buoyed by the crowds that loved her. Ever the media darling, Inez’s uncanny ability to captivate a room impressed all the newspaper writers who were dispatched to report on her doings, and when they saw her in person, they continued to marvel at her beauty. The attention she was bringing to the cause was vital. No one else could do what Inez was doing.
Inez arrived in San Francisco strung out on very little sleep after a blur of dozens of stops. True to form, her fatigue didn’t stop her from wowing a crowd of fifteen hundred people before departing by train later that evening for Pasadena, near where Maria de Lopez lived. A train accident elsewhere on the tracks delayed Inez and Vida’s train. They didn’t even board until 3:00 a.m. The next day, tour organizers had to substitute another speaker for Inez at an event for the Pasadena club women.
After the mishap of Pasadena, Inez pressed on to speak at Blanchard Hall, another Los Angeles venue. Blanchard Hall had a capacity of eight hundred. One thousand people crammed the auditorium, with hundreds more turned away at the door for lack of space. “President Wilson, how long must this go on?” Inez implored from the podium. “President Wilson, how long must women wait for liberty?”[16] She raised her arm to demonstrate the sweep of her argument, her compelling voice carrying through the hall.
And then, without warning, she collapsed into a “dead faint.” The Los Angeles Times described how she “crumpled like a wilted white rose and lay stark upon the platform.”[17] Women rushed to her side and carried her offstage. Fifteen minutes later, Inez was back, this time sitting in a chair to talk to the audience. “I have tonsillitis,” she explained. “Don’t worry about me.”[18]
The next morning, Inez’s companions summoned another doctor, who immediately called in Dr. Catherine Lynch to examine her. No amount of strong coffee, sleep, or strychnine had cured Inez, and her collapse left Vida legitimately concerned for her sister. By now, Inez’s gums were bleeding and she was too weak to stand. Lynch took one look at her and called in a throat specialist, who determined that her ailment was now affecting her heart. “If you don’t have surgery immediately to remove your tonsils and several infected teeth,” they told her, “you will die. Period.”
Inez and the organizers of the tour were desperate to continue. The election was but weeks away, and this was their last chance to plead their case—to set free the disenfranchised women of America. But when Inez became so weak she could barely sit up, Vida finally took charge. She was used to being the younger sister to the beautiful and magnetic Inez, but she refused to let her sister die from her lack of action. Vida insisted on admitting Inez to the hospital.
Once Inez was examined at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, she was given IV hydration, and blood tests revealed the real culprit behind Inez’s failing health: aplastic anemia, a chronic illness in which one’s body is unable to properly make new red blood cells. Inez’s blood counts were half what they should have been. Her teeth were operated on, but doctors deemed her not well enough to undergo the tonsil procedure. They hoped she would improve enough in a few weeks that she’d be able to withstand the second surgery. There was no choice now, the rest of the tour had to be called off. Inez was distraught, shivering and feverish beneath mountains of blankets, unable to get warm.
The news of her illness hit the papers, and the world waited with bated breath. Dozens of telegrams arrived for Inez every day. Reporters crowded the hospital hallway, eager for any news they could glean. Updates of her condition were published around the country.
Two weeks had now passed since Inez was hospitalized. Despite trying to boost her blood counts with food and hydration, her anemia was still too severe for her to undergo the needed tonsil surgery. She required a blood transfusion.
Transfusions in 1916 are the same as they are today, in that a person gets blood via an IV. But they are different in nearly every other way. For example: for Inez’s first transfusion, Vida sat on a chair next to her, and blood was taken directly from Vida’s arm and put into Inez’s. Inez rallied, but then relapsed. Vida donated again, weakening her own condition considerably.
Inez’s husband arrived, and together, Eugen and Vida kept Inez company in the hospital. Vida was forced to deliver the bad news to their parents: things were not looking good. You should come.
When Inez’s parents arrived, doctors barred them from seeing her, except for when Inez was asleep—they felt that too much stimulation would harm Inez’s chance of recovery. More transfusions were ordered, with four friends that shared her blood type offering up donations. Each yielded the same results: a short rally followed by a relapse.
Three weeks after entering the hospital, her fever spiked to 106. She had developed pleurisy, an inflammation of the chest lining, and every excruciating breath had to be worked for. Inez kept insisting she would improve, promising her parents that she was going to be better any day. She saw another suffrage worker who came to visit, and Inez whispered her encouragement, “It’s not going to be so hard now. Women have shown their power.”[19] Wilson had won reelection, despite Inez’s best efforts, but progress on suffrage was being made at the state level.
Inez’s body was giving out, purpled all over in dark bruises, but her mind remained clear. Her family grew grief-stricken, and her husband beside himself. “Shall I come with you?” Eugen asked, desperate.
“No,” she told him. “You go ahead and live another life.”[20]
A few hours later, on November 25, 1916, Inez Milholland Boissevain died. She was only thirty years old.
At once Inez became the Joan of Arc of the suffrage movement, a martyr for the cause of liberty. An obituary ran on the front page of The New York Times the next day. Suffrage workers sprang into action planning a memorial befitting such a hero, and one month later, on Christmas Day, she was memorialized in Statuary Hall inside the U.S. Capitol. She was the first women ever honored there, and she was the first person so honored who wasn’t a member of Congress.
When I say that the National Woman’s Party wanted to send a message with this tribute, that is an understatement. They wanted a spectacle of suffrage. They wanted Congress and President Wilson to see what they had done to Inez, how the only reason she undertook this excruciating journey to begin with was because they continued to deny women the right to vote. Washington, D.C., would see suffrage from every angle that Christmas Day. Suffrage leaders swathed the Capitol in banners and buntings in the colors of the suffrage movement: purple, gold, and white.
Over one thousand people left their Christmas plans behind to take part in the service for Inez Milholland. Security had to turn people away at the door. In the House of Representatives office buildings across the street, a boys’ choir assembled and processed into Statuary Hall, chanting the words on the banner Inez had carried, now held aloft by renowned suffragist Alice Paul:
Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward through the darkness
Forward into light
Lucy Burns held a banner that read: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” The Washington Post reported that other banners cited Scripture, saying, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”[21]
Elizabeth Kent, wife of California senator William Kent, said that Inez was “blithe and valiant and unafraid to be herself, even though she knew that self…would not be understood by the many with eyes on today.”[22]
Suffragist Maud Younger eulogized her, saying, “Inez Milholland is one around whom legends will grow up. Generations to come will point out Mount Inez and tell of the beautiful woman who sleeps her last on its slopes.”[23]
(In 2019, the Department of the Interior renamed a peak in the Adirondacks in her honor. You can visit Mount Inez in the town of Lewis, New York.)
