Inez

About this book

"The lively last decade of the U.S. suffrage movement saw the rise of its most glamorous and celebrated messenger, Inez Milholland. She became an icon of the movement, a symbol of its idealism, and an inspiration for its most spectacular campaigns, most notably the unprecedented picketing of the White House in 1917. A century later, she has vanished from memory. But when prewar Americans beheld Milholland, she appeared to embody their highest hopes for the modern, twentieth-century woman. Going to jail alongside striking workers, charging a drunken mob astride her white horse, trekking to the Italian front to cover the war - Inez's exploits assumed mythic proportions. Her classic looks - a mane of dark hair, blue-gray eyes, a robust physique - captivated the press, which was well on the way towards its love affair with celebrity. Reporters anointed her the most beautiful suffragist in the land. Men called her a goddess, an Amazon." "In this first-ever biography, Linda J. Lumsden creates the life and times of this epitome of the "New Woman," an important link between the homebound women of the nineteenth century and the iconoclastic feminists of the 1960s. Like other New Women, Milholland placed a high priority on creating a rewarding personal life. But she also envisioned a new sexual politics and struggled to put it into practice. She advocated gender equity, birth control, sexual fulfillment, labor unions, socialism, pacifism, and freedom of expression; she opposed war, censorship, all forms of sex and race discrimination, corporate greed, and capital punishment."--BOOK JACKET.