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February 21, 2019

The Most Beautiful Suffragette

Inez Milholland. The martyr to the American women’s suffrage movement. She died from pernicious anemia, which as martyrdoms go, isn’t the MOST dramatic, but there we have it.

She’s famous for a few things:

1) Being a lawyer at the turn of the century (WHAT, so cool)

2) Being the most beautiful suffragette (sure)

3) Riding a white horse in the Suffrage Parade of 1913 with a fun crown on her head

4) Her dying words being “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”

Now look. I’m not questioning things, per se, but those are PRETTY good last words for the suffrage cause. But since she was so committed to it, maybe she had that line all queued up. We’ll never know. Unless we believe the suffragists of her time, in which case we definitely know.

Milholland died at age 30 from pernicious anemia after a grueling speaking campaign for the suffrage cause. She collapsed while speaking on stage in Los Angeles and died 10 days later. She and Emily Wilding Davison in the British suffrage movement remain the two most famous martyrs for the women’s suffrage cause.

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