Background
Inez Boissevain was born on August 6, 1886, in New York City, New York, United States, the daughter of John W. and Jean (Torrey) Milholland. Her father was a newspaper man.
Inez Boissevain was born on August 6, 1886, in New York City, New York, United States, the daughter of John W. and Jean (Torrey) Milholland. Her father was a newspaper man.
Inez received her early education at the Comstock School in New York, the Kensington High School, London, and the Willard School in Berlin, and obtained the B. A. degree at Vassar in 1909. After graduation she tried for admission at both Oxford and Cambridge with the purpose of studying law, but without success. She also failed to gain admission to the Harvard Law School, but was finally matriculated at the New York University Law School, from which she took her LL. B. degree.
As a student Inez was known as an active radical. She started the suffrage movement at Vassar, enrolled two-thirds of the students, and taught them the principles of socialism. With the radical group she had gathered about her, she attended socialist meetings in Poughkeepsie which were under the ban of the faculty. She was interested in every way in the working conditions and rights of women and took a prominent part in the shirtwaist strike in New York in 1912. She was a member of the Political Equality League, the Woman's Trade Union League, the Women's Political Union, the National Child Labor Committee, the Fabian Society, and the Women's Social and Political Union of England.
In December 1915 she joined the Ford Peace Party which, however, she left at Stockholm because she considered its methods undemocratic. Her most prominent work was done in connection with the movement for woman's suffrage. After the suffrage convention in Philadelphia in 1912 she organized a picturesque demonstration in Washington in which, mounted on a white horse, she led a parade of women down Pennsylvania Avenue. She was then called the American Joan of Arc.
At the head of a department for women in McClure's Magazine which began in 1913, she wrote a number of articles on woman's rights. Her mind was full of ideas and she expressed herself well. Aligned with the radical wing which early in 1916 took the name of National Woman's Party, she took an active part in the presidential campaign of that year. She traveled through the twelve western states which at that time had given women the vote and appealed for help for the Republican party which had pledged itself to support an amendment granting woman suffrage. Unsparing of her strength, she collapsed in Los Angeles during a speech and after ten weeks died of anemia brought on by her over-exertions. The National Woman's Party held a beautiful and striking memorial service for her on Christmas Day 1916 in Statuary Hall in the Capitol at Washington.
On July 14, 1913, Inez was married in London to F. E. Boissevain, son of Charles Boissevain of Amsterdam.
