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PaperCity_Dallas_September_2021

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WHO WAS INEZ MILHOLLAND? By Catherine D. Anspon THE GLORIA STEINEM OF 1916 GETS HER DAY IN DALLAS. S he was a paradox and a pioneer who, a century ago, led 8,000 women on a march down Pennsylvania Avenue astride a white horse in front of a throng of a quarter million. She passionately addressed thousands at national rallies and undertook an ambitious cross- country tour that would take her life, all in the name of women's suffrage. If you've never heard of Inez Milholland, that will change this fall with "Jeanine Michna-Bales, Standing Together: Inez Milholland's Final Campaign for Women's Suffrage," the season opener at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery. The exhibition and accompanying book of the same title reflect Dallas artist Michna-Bales' quest to tell the story of the suffrage movement in America via one particular catalyst. And what a subject Milholland makes: a wealthy, upper-class woman whose enlightened parents sent her to Vassar, then law school. She graduated from NYU after being rejected by Harvard Law because she was a woman, then became a labor lawyer and a journalist involved with pacifist causes who went to Italy to cover World War I and sailed on Henry Ford's Peace Boat. Milholland was involved with the radical political journal The Masses and was even rumored to be the model for Wonder Woman, who was created by a contemporary, William Moulton Marston. Her greatest cause was winning the vote. She herself lost her American citizenship for marrying a foreigner. Her husband, the wealthy Dutch businessman Eugen Jan Boissevain, was a champion rower who would go on to champion his wife's causes. (He was attracted to powerful, accomplished women; his second wife was Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he married seven years after Milholland passed away; Millay would write a poem to honor the suffragist that same year.) Saved from Obscurity Michna-Bales is a unique artist who specializes in decoding the past and is well suited to such challenges. Before the current conversation to redress America's dark crimes of slavery, she Inez Milholland, 1911 PHOTO BY RULDOLF EICKEMEYER, JR., COLLECTION OF JOHN TEPPER MARLINE, COURTESY OF NATIONAL WOMAN'S PARTY RECORDS, MANUSCRIPT DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COURTESY GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 54

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