The Small and the Mighty, page 12
Rebecca didn’t get the chaplain job. People watched her try and fail, and some undoubtedly judged her for it.
The next year, she went to bat for the appointment again, having spent considerable time getting to know the legislators who were in the position of power to make the call. This time, when the legislative session opened, it was Rebecca whose voice filled the room, lifting a prayer to the almighty, as the men listened with bowed heads. Rebecca was the first female chaplain of a legislative body in world history.[26]
She received letters of congratulations from all over the United States, and she said, “As worn as I was with the long battle for citizenship, I was cheered by the honor given me in my old age, a kind compensation for long weary miles of stage travel and storm and cold.”[27]
When she took her post in 1897, she found that “the jeers of men were forgotten, the haughty looks of women who had all the rights they wanted, faded away as a cloud before the sun…. Not for myself did I care so much…but for Womanhood was victory dear to my heart.”[28] Men and institutions that had stood in the way of Rebecca Brown Mitchell had learned to stand aside or come to grief over their opposition. She was sixty-four years old.
Oh, did you think she stopped there? Of course not. Boxes of books stored under her bed? Might as well start the Idaho Falls Public Library, she thought. Eventually, community members were able to get a Carnegie Foundation grant and build a proper library building.
The city of Idaho Falls doesn’t have the infrastructure to beautify its public spaces? Might as well start a Civic Improvement Club and grow some trees.
No historian has come to write the story of Eagle Rock/Idaho Falls? Let me get right on that.
Why not do the unheard-of thing, indeed.
When Rebecca died in 1908, her strength having been slowly sapped by tuberculosis, an article in The Wilsonville Review mentioned that the WCTU was planning a marble monument to her. The Review wrote, “While a monument of marble would serve to perpetuate her memory, far richer monuments are the churches she has fostered, the schools she has founded, the libraries she has opened, the Sunday schools she has established, and men and women who are better men and women for having come in contact with her influence.”[29]
Rebecca took a train across the country to live in a shed. She was never the type who aspired to a marble bust of her face in a hushed memorial hall somewhere. Instead, I think she’d love to know that some of the institutions she nurtured, the schools and the churches and the libraries, the places that continue to help their communities learn about justice and truth and right—these are the most fitting monuments to the woman who finally picked the lock of the iron cage of the law.
On Christmas Day, a few months after her death, The Idaho Republican published a resolution that said Mitchell was “ever ready to proffer the hand of aid and the voice of sympathy to the needy and distressed…a woman of heroic courage, faith, and fearlessness, in championing every right and righteous cause and whose self-sacrificing spirit will ever be an inspiration to all who knew her.”[30]
In 2022, Idaho erected a statue to commemorate women’s suffrage. Cast in bronze, the Spirit of Idaho Women depicts a lithe figure with an outstretched hand. Behind her stand twelve sets of shoes, those of the generations of women who came before, each decade of suffragists treading the path to enfranchisement. In her hand, she extends a shoe to the women of the future, inviting them to continue in the work that was begun by those with the courage to let people watch them fail.
Twelve
Inez Milholland
The West, 1916
In between her headline-grabbing turns at the forefront of suffrage marches, Inez’s private life had unfolded as well. She finished law school and secretly eloped with a Dutch man named Eugen Boissevain. Even though Inez was a new kind of woman, she and Eugen longed for a child. Many of the letters between them detail this fondest wish, one that was never realized.
By 1916, the struggles of the national suffrage movement were beginning to bear fruit. Women had gained the right to vote in eleven states, all in the West. Why the West? A few reasons stand out:
Territorial organizers wanted more settlers so they could gain statehood. Correction: they wanted more white settlers. And they figured that if they wanted more white men, they could get them by enticing white women to move to the territories. In the words of Maria Portokalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “Men may be the head of the household, but women are the neck.” Wherever the women looked, the men were sure to follow.
Organized activism. Suffrage shows us the importance of organization when seeking to make change. Without the newspapers and lobbyists, the events and the publicity, the connections and the infrastructure, voting rights for women would have taken decades longer, if not more.
Coalitions. People with a common goal worked together. In Oregon, for example, twenty-three separate suffrage groups coalesced around pulling for the same thing. Black women and Chinese women, Jewish women and Quaker women, women who supported prohibition and women who ran saloons—rather than trying to go it alone, they formed a united front.[1]
The western states were a good start, but they weren’t enough. Suffragists wanted a constitutional amendment, and their work picked up a feverish pace. In furtherance of their goal, they formed a new political party: the National Woman’s Party. One of their goals was mobilizing the women of the West, who could vote, to get rid of Woodrow Wilson in the next election, since he was seen as one of the primary obstacles to progress.
They began to step up the pressure. Suffragists attended every speech Wilson gave, and one woman, Mabel Vernon, interrupted him multiple times while he was addressing the American Federation of Labor on July 4, 1916. She yelled, “Mr. President, if you sincerely desire to forward the interests of all the people, why do you oppose the national enfranchisement of women?”[2] Later, after Wilson refused to respond, she called again for him to answer the question. She was promptly escorted out by the Secret Service.
Later, Mabel Vernon would attend one of Wilson’s congressional addresses.
She situated herself in the balcony, in the direct sight line of the Speaker’s podium. Pinned underneath her skirt was a banner, which, at precisely the right moment, she unfurled from the balcony of the House of Representatives. “MR. PRESIDENT WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?” the banner demanded.[3] The suffragists in attendance sat quietly, expectantly, waiting for Wilson to look up from his written remarks.
Murmurs rippled through the room, members of Congress craning their necks to see what had happened. Finally, Wilson looked up and saw the banner. He smiled broadly and immediately returned to reading his prepared statement. As the women were escorted out, a representative greeted the press outside the Capitol with prepared statements listing the names of the women involved and offering them up for comments and interviews.
The women did not try to conceal their identities, didn’t come armed, didn’t break any glass or invade any private offices. They weren’t there to kidnap members of Congress; no faux gallows waited outside the building. They came peacefully, stayed in the section designated for visitors, and left peacefully, confident that they had made their point. Suffrage leader Alice Paul smiled happily at reporters and remarked, “It was a most excellent demonstration. Certainly we may in the future adopt various methods not dissimilar from the one we used today to keep Congress reminded of our cause.”[4]
Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party held its first convention in the summer of 1916. If they could mobilize the four million women who had gained voting rights in the West, that was one-third of the votes needed to elect a president. What they needed was to inspire women in solidarity to know that their highest loyalty was owed not to the Republican Party or Woodrow Wilson, but to women, and convince them that voting against the interests of women was morally wrong.
Inez Milholland took the stage in Chicago at the first convention of the National Woman’s Party, dazzling the audience with the force of her fame. “I believe,” she said to the assembled crowds, “and every woman of spirit and independence believes, that women are human beings with a definite part to play in the shaping of human events…. we must say, ‘Women first!’ ”[5]
The crowd erupted.
The Deseret News reported that the convention’s attendees had a motto of “Duty first! Duty to other women; duty to the many millions living in the slave states.”[6]
For the first time in history, women had organized themselves into a political force to be reckoned with. A new battalion was assembling at the edge of the battlefield for equal rights. But before the year was out, Inez Milholland, who had survived a violent mob in Washington, D.C., would be a martyr for the cause.
Leader Alice Paul planned a speaking tour, one that would take suffrage workers on an ambitious journey across the western states in October 1916, just before the presidential election where they hoped to unseat Woodrow Wilson. Inez Milholland Boissevain, one of the most popular speakers in the party’s arsenal, reluctantly agreed to headline the tour. She had been feeling ill for some time, so her little sister, Vida, agreed to come along for emotional and physical support. Vida would help make sure Inez slept and ate, that her clothing was organized, and that everything was in order on each stop from Kansas to California.
But no matter how much she slept, Inez never felt rested. Her throat was on fire. Her neck hurt whenever she moved her head. When she and her sister boarded the train for the first eighteen-hour leg of their journey, Inez hoped to wake up at the first tour stop refreshed. Instead, she was worse. The sisters sent for a doctor. After examining her, the doctor told Inez that her tonsils were infected, and had been for some time, which was probably why she felt so run down—her body was trying to fight the infection. Aside from that, the doctor said, Inez was as healthy as a horse. As soon as possible, he said, you will need to get your tonsils removed. But in the meantime, he said, “Here, take these,” handing her strychnine and arsenic pills, common (though deadly) treatments for infection in the decades before penicillin.[7]
Privately, Inez struggled with depression. Her career in the law had languished. The child she yearned for didn’t appear. But forward she forged, adrenaline allowing her to dazzle onstage and then collapse into bed afterward. Vida was a classically trained singer, and she entertained audiences with her voice while waiting for Inez to take the stage, sometimes in a large hall, sometimes at an intimate ladies’ tea, and sometimes on the back terrace of a train car. “After each meeting,” Vida said, Inez “wilted and looked like a ghost.”[8]
But before every event, Inez would rally. Newspapers described her delivery as having a “dramatic charm,” and that what she had to say was “fearlessly expressed.”[9] Another noted that she was “as beautiful as her pictures promised,” and that her personality was “magnetic.”[10]
At one speech in Boise, Inez shouted, “What is your answer, women with the ballot? Are you going to lick the hand that smites you like the hounds?” And, “Women should assert their power. If women don’t respect themselves, no one else will.”[11]
Rebecca Mitchell had been dead for eight years. But Inez’s position on that stage, encouraging enfranchised women—like the women of Idaho—to set aside their party preference and vote in the best interest of women nationwide? That was only possible because of the decades of labor that Mitchell and women like her put in, the path that was cleared for the people who came behind.
“It is women for women now, and shall be until the fight is won!” Inez declared. “How can our nation be free with half of its citizens mute and unadvised? In union alone is strength!”[12] Inez rallied her listeners, bringing them what she felt was a message of hope.
Some trains didn’t depart until 2:00 a.m., and some arrived at 5:00 a.m. The lack of consistent rest, the strain of being in the public eye, of having to look and speak the part at all times, contributed to Inez’s malaise. “We travel every night, get up early every morning, and keep on the go all day,” Inez remarked to a dinner guest in Multnomah, Oregon. “I cannot see how I can keep going, but I just have to.”[13]
Inez thought of the tens of thousands of women who were waiting for her at the coming stops. She thought of her own family and friends in New York who could not vote yet. In fact, Inez herself could not yet vote. She thought of the all the Black women in the South who would never be granted the right to vote from their state because of racial prejudice. Inez insisted on pressing forward. She had come too far to turn back now. Forward.
By the time they arrived in Montana, Inez had a fever. She glittered on stage, with The Butte Daily Post reporting that her “personality…[was] no less striking than her personal beauty.” She told her audience, “Our self-respect as suffragists demands that we repudiate the political party that has consistently ignored the claims of women.”[14] But in private, her head “had on a tight iron cup of pain,” her throat hurt so badly it was nearly all she could think about, and she was so weak she could only stand with assistance. They summoned another doctor. This one prescribed strong coffee and more strychnine.[15]
Strychnine is used today as rat poison. It’s a neurotoxin, and works by binding to receptors on nerve cells, which then makes them more susceptible to stimulation with lower levels of neurotransmitters. It was used medicinally at the time as a stimulant, which is why doctors would have prescribed it to Inez, whose stamina and energy were flagging. One small problem with strychnine: it is deadly at even a very low dose, and the difference between a medicinally effective dose and a deadly dose is tiny. The muscles you use to breathe can contract so strongly that they suffocate you to death.
The grueling tour continued on, but Inez’s spirits were buoyed by the crowds that loved her. Ever the media darling, Inez’s uncanny ability to captivate a room impressed all the newspaper writers who were dispatched to report on her doings, and when they saw her in person, they continued to marvel at her beauty. The attention she was bringing to the cause was vital. No one else could do what Inez was doing.
Inez arrived in San Francisco strung out on very little sleep after a blur of dozens of stops. True to form, her fatigue didn’t stop her from wowing a crowd of fifteen hundred people before departing by train later that evening for Pasadena, near where Maria de Lopez lived. A train accident elsewhere on the tracks delayed Inez and Vida’s train. They didn’t even board until 3:00 a.m. The next day, tour organizers had to substitute another speaker for Inez at an event for the Pasadena club women.
After the mishap of Pasadena, Inez pressed on to speak at Blanchard Hall, another Los Angeles venue. Blanchard Hall had a capacity of eight hundred. One thousand people crammed the auditorium, with hundreds more turned away at the door for lack of space. “President Wilson, how long must this go on?” Inez implored from the podium. “President Wilson, how long must women wait for liberty?”[16] She raised her arm to demonstrate the sweep of her argument, her compelling voice carrying through the hall.
And then, without warning, she collapsed into a “dead faint.” The Los Angeles Times described how she “crumpled like a wilted white rose and lay stark upon the platform.”[17] Women rushed to her side and carried her offstage. Fifteen minutes later, Inez was back, this time sitting in a chair to talk to the audience. “I have tonsillitis,” she explained. “Don’t worry about me.”[18]
The next morning, Inez’s companions summoned another doctor, who immediately called in Dr. Catherine Lynch to examine her. No amount of strong coffee, sleep, or strychnine had cured Inez, and her collapse left Vida legitimately concerned for her sister. By now, Inez’s gums were bleeding and she was too weak to stand. Lynch took one look at her and called in a throat specialist, who determined that her ailment was now affecting her heart. “If you don’t have surgery immediately to remove your tonsils and several infected teeth,” they told her, “you will die. Period.”
Inez and the organizers of the tour were desperate to continue. The election was but weeks away, and this was their last chance to plead their case—to set free the disenfranchised women of America. But when Inez became so weak she could barely sit up, Vida finally took charge. She was used to being the younger sister to the beautiful and magnetic Inez, but she refused to let her sister die from her lack of action. Vida insisted on admitting Inez to the hospital.
Once Inez was examined at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, she was given IV hydration, and blood tests revealed the real culprit behind Inez’s failing health: aplastic anemia, a chronic illness in which one’s body is unable to properly make new red blood cells. Inez’s blood counts were half what they should have been. Her teeth were operated on, but doctors deemed her not well enough to undergo the tonsil procedure. They hoped she would improve enough in a few weeks that she’d be able to withstand the second surgery. There was no choice now, the rest of the tour had to be called off. Inez was distraught, shivering and feverish beneath mountains of blankets, unable to get warm.
The news of her illness hit the papers, and the world waited with bated breath. Dozens of telegrams arrived for Inez every day. Reporters crowded the hospital hallway, eager for any news they could glean. Updates of her condition were published around the country.
