[NYTr] 1918: Woman on White Horse Pressed for Suffrage

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Woman on White Horse Pressed for Suffrage

By Louise Bernikow
WeNews historian

(WOMENSENEWS)--One of the most enduring images of the fight for the
vote in the early part of the 20th century is the woman riding a white
horse at the head of an enormous parade in the nation's capital.

Her name was Inez Milholland. By the time she collapsed onstage in the
middle of a rousing speech in Los Angeles on Oct. 23, 1917, the Vassar
graduate, progressive activist and beautiful embodiment of the "New
Woman" had become a national celebrity, the popular face of the
militant wing of the women's movement.

Suffering from several illnesses--including tonsillitis, anemia and a
rare blood disease--she hauled herself across the Western states that
autumn, stopping in mountain mining towns and waiting on frozen train
platforms to rally support for the 19th amendment, which had passed the
House of Representatives but was stalled in the Senate. In Los Angeles,
Milholland was rushed to a hospital, where she lingered for a month
before she died.

Alice Paul and others in the National Women's Party not only honored
Milholland for years afterwards but used her "sacrifice" as a symbol to
rally the troops and press forward. To mark her birthday on Aug. 6, the
year after she died they assembled directly across from the White House
at the base of a statue of General Lafayette, the Frenchman who fought
on behalf of the colonists during the American Revolution.

Demonstrators clad in white, hatless and coatless in the midsummer
heat, led by a woman carrying the U.S. flag, marched to the Lafayette
statue. Each speaker got no further than her first sentence when she
was arrested. In the end, 48 women were seized by the police. When they
came to trial 10 days later, 18 of the protestors faced 15-day
sentences for "climbing on a statue."

For many years afterwards, demonstrations and rallies were held in
August to celebrate passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920 as well
as to commemorate Milholland. In 1924, more than a thousand players
performed a lavish pageant depicting her life. Ten thousand people
attended. Milholland's sister, Vida, rode in on a white horse, accepted
a "torch of freedom" from one of the players and, in turn, lit smaller
torches, which she passed out to 30 young women.

Milholland's husband, Eugene Boissevain, had married again. His second
wife, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, wrote a sonnet dedicated to
Milholland whose final lines echo the torch-passing:

Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:
Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

[Louise Bernikow is the author of seven books and numerous magazine
articles. She travels to campuses and community groups with a lecture
and slide show about activism called "The Shoulders We Stand On: Women
as Agents of Change." She can be reached at louise at womensenews.org.]

For more information:

Library of Congress, American Memory profile of Inez Milholland:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/profiles3.html

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "To Inez Milholland":
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Poetry/Millay/To_Inez_Milholland.html