Honoring an Island leader: Observing Women’s History Month

Shelter Island can proudly claim Inez Milholland, known as “The Woman on the White Horse,” who led one of the first mass demonstrations for women’s suffrage in 1913, wearing a long, white cape atop a white steed.

The photo above was released this week by the Shelter Island Historical Society to observe Women’s History Month.

The late Carol Galligan traced the suffragette’s story in a Reporter article in 2017, the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York State.

Born in 1886 in Brooklyn to a wealthy family who summered on Shelter Island, Ms. Milholland was the daughter of the owner of seven large, contiguous lots on the western side of the Island.

She attended Vassar College, where all suffrage activities were forbidden by its male president. Ms. Milholland succeeded in radicalizing almost the entire student population.

After graduation, she went to law school at New York University, receiving her degree in 1912, and began to practice labor law. She had been refused admission at both Yale and Harvard because of her gender.

Ms. Milholland had participated in her first suffrage parade in 1911 and then again in 1912, both in New York. She had held a sign that read “Forward out of error/ Leave behind the night,/ Forward through the darkness,/ Forward into light.”

Another parade was planned in Washington to continue the fight for women’s rights on the day before President Woodrow Wilson was to be inaugurated, with Ms. Milholland leading the march astride a white horse.

More than 8,000 women marched, with 26 floats and 10 bands, and more than 500,000 people gathered along the parade route up Pennsylvania Avenue, the same route the inauguration parade would follow.

It wasn’t long before insults and objects were hurled at the marchers and at the floats, many of which had small children participating. Police looked the other way and did little when bands of angry men pushed through the rope lines and attacked the marchers.

The march leaders requested a meeting with the president, “before the bruises faded,” they said, and it was granted. On March 17, a delegation that included Ms. Milholland met with President Wilson. At the meeting he maintained, not quite truthfully, that the issue of suffrage was “new” to him and that he needed time “to educate himself.”

Within a short time, three separate resolutions in favor of women’s suffrage had been introduced and were under consideration in the Senate Rules Committee, and although no action was taken, this was a victory; it had been more than 30 years since the word “suffrage” had been mentioned in either house of Congress.

The movement suffered a significant loss in November 1916 when Ms. Milholland collapsed while campaigning in California and was rushed to a hospital. Diagnosed with “pernicious anemia,” she died after several treatments were attempted but failed. She was 30 years old.

Her last public words before she lost consciousness at the podium were, “Mr. President! How long must women wait for liberty?” In her honor, these words were emblazoned on flags, banners and buttons throughout the subsequent years of struggle.

Following her death, her husband Eugene Jan Boissevain married poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who dedicated a poem to Ms. Milholland. Read at the dedication of a statue to suffragette leaders at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., the poem included the lines:

I, that was proud and valiant, am no more; —

Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,

Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.

The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.

Only my standard on a taken hill

Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust

And make immortal my adventurous will.

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