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Inez
Milholland astride her horse, but without the banner "Forward
Into Light." This is how Milholland appeared in the 1913
New York City suffrage parade. |
THE HERALD FIGURE AS "THE WOMAN
ON A HORSE"
While
moderates and militants shared some common American thematic
elements, as well as the color gold, the NWP imagery was more
militant in keeping with the philosophy of the Party. Inez Milholland
represents a classic study in the divergent imagery of the NAWSA
and the NWP, as well as a transmutation of English suffrage
imagery into American usage. While at Vassar College (1905-1909),
Milholland enrolled two-thirds of her fellow students in a campus
suffrage organization. Later, while on vacation in England,
she joined the militant Pankhurst suffrage group, for whom she
made suffrage speeches and with whom she was arrested. [15]
After her return to the United States, Milholland joined Blatch's
Equality League of Self-Supporting Women which later became
the Women's Political Union. It was during this interval that
she appeared in the New York suffrage parades. When Alice Paul
founded the Congressional Union in 1913, based in Washington,
D.C., Milholland joined.
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Inez
Milholland at the head of the 1913 Washington, D. C. suffrage
parade. The wearing of white for women demonstrators had
a long history in this country beginning with temperance
demonstrations in the 19th century. Some men ridiculed the
temperance protestors in their street demonstrations, saying
that women on the streets must be women of
the streets! Temperance workers began wearing white clothing
during their protests to denote their personal purity and
the purity of their Cause, a tradition followed by the suffrage
demonstrators after them. |
Milholland's participation in two major suffrage
parades, one in New York City, the other in Washington, D.C.,
in March of 1913, fixed her firmly in American suffrage imagery
as the breathtaking figure of The Herald, known to mainstream
suffragists and their modern-day descendants as "The Woman on
a Horse." |
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Cover
from the British Suffragette magazine, published
by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the
Pankhurst suffrage organization. It features the Joan
of Arc figure and uses the WSPU color of purple, white,
and green.
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BRITISH USE JOAN OF ARC AS PATRON SAINT
With the blending and blurring of British
and American images, this figure struck a resonant and responsive
chord. With distinct cultural echoes of Joan of Arc, whom the
British militant suffragettes adopted as their patron saint
and who was widely used in the British movement, this figure
was at once militant, yet godly. She represented moral authority
and suggested Joan's martyrdom for a righteous cause. She coupled
woman's righteousness with divinely sanctioned, even divinely
ordained, militancy. She symbolized the leadership of righteous
women in a patriotic "Holy War," in a cause of self-sacrifice
for God and country that closely paralleled the suffrage movement's
rhetoric. The figure conveyed at once unquestioned patriotism
and the redemption by godly women of venal and bumbling men
for the good of the nation. She connoted marching (the suffrage
parades) and, in the United States, the para military discipline
of a large corps of "troops," if not outright militancy. It
is not accidental that this figure connoted "Joan" to the American
groups with British militant origins, and was therefore transmuted
and secularized into the "Herald" figure by mainstream suffragists.
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