Inez Milholland preparing to lead the great march for women’s suffrage: March 3, 1913 (source).
As a student at Vassar, Inez Milholland enrolled two-thirds of the students in the fight for women’s suffrage and socialism; she was also the captain of the hockey team. Refused admission to law school at Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge because of her gender, she earned a degree from the New York University School of Law in 1912. A member of the NAACP, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Women’s Political Union, the National Child Labor Committee, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the radical National Woman’s Party, she supported prison reform, world peace, and racial equality.
Milholland died young, at the age of 30, in 1916. Carl Sandburg wrote this poem:
Repetitions
They are crying salt tears
Over the beautiful beloved body
Of Inez Milholland,
Because they are glad she lived,
Because she loved open-armed,
Throwing love for a cheap thing
Belonging to everybody—
Cheap as sunlight,
And morning air.