Committee to Restore the Painting of Inez Milholland Boissevain, Sewall-Belmont House
2011 - May 19. Sewall-Belmont
House reopens; the restored painting of Inez Milholland Boissevain is
unveiled in a new context, as the House becomes more of a Museum, with a
Message.
Under
co-chairs Al Boissevain and Allegra Milholland, the Committee raised
$4,000 to restore the iconic portrait of Inez Milholland Boissevain in
the main hall of theSewall-Belmont House and Museum.
For more information and photos on the transformation of the Sewall-Belmont House, click here.
Committee Formed, March 13, 2010
A
Committee is forming to raise funds to restore the iconic portrait (see
left) of Inez Milholland Boissevain on
the first floor of the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum,
144 Constitution Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002-5608. The
Committee's goal is to raise the $4,000 that an art restoration company
has estimated it will require to restore the nearly 100-year-old
painting, in time for the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th
Amendment on August 26, 2010. Gifts to the Sewall-Belmont House and
Museum are tax-deductible to U.S. donors since it is a 501-c-3
tax-exempt charity. You may send a check directly to the Sewall-Belmont
House, c/o Page Harrington. Please note on the check: "Inez portrait
restoration fund." The Committee is so far (March 13, 2010 - updated in Current News) composed of the following:
Al
Boissevain, Nephew of Inez Milholland and Eugen Boissevain - and
believed to be the sole surviving grandchild of Charles Boissevain and
Emily MacDonnell Boissevain - Bloomington, IN.
Annie Boissevain, Great-Niece of Eugen Boissevain and Manager of Big Shot Communications, Portland, ME. Ben Boissevain, 2nd Cousin of Eugen Boissevain and Managing Partner, Agile Equity, New York, NY Claire Boissevain, RN, Great-Niece of Eugen Boissevain, Bloomington, IN Jan Willem Boissevain, Manager, the Boissevain foundation (www.boissevain.org, bilingual) in the Netherlands
Eleanor Clift, Author, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth
Amendment (Wiley
2003).
Linda
Cunningham Goldstein, Former Executive Director of the Woodlawn
Plantation and Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey House in Mount Vernon,
Virginia and Turning Point
Suffragist Memorial Interpretation and Design Committee. Phyllis Eckhaus, Author, article on Inez Milholland in Harvard Magazine (November-December 1994), New York, NY Riva Freifeld, Producer, PBS Feature Documentary, "Annie Oakley", New York, NY Margaret Gibbs, Director, Essex
County Historical Society, Adirondack
History Center Museum, Elizabethtown, NY
Page Harrington, Executive Director, Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, DC Linda Lumsden, Prof. of Journalism, Univ. of Arizona, and Author of Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland, Tucson, AZ Alice Tepper Marlin, President, Social Accountability International, New York, NY
Brigid Marlin, Great-Niece of Eugen Boissevain and
Chair, Society for Art of Imagination, Berkhamsted, Herts., UK John Tepper Marlin, Great-Nephew of Eugen Boissevain and Author, "Take Up the Song", New York, NY and Washington, DC Barbara Page, Lockwood Professor of English Emerita and Editor, Elizabeth Bishop Bulletin, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY Olivia Milholland, Niece of Inez
Milholland (married to the son of Inez Milholland's brother John), now
living in the Barnstable area, MA
Lindsay Pontius, Museum Educator, Adirondack History Center
Museum, Essex County Historical Society, Elizabethtown, NY
Amy Jan Simon,
Actress, President, She's History, Los Angeles, CA. Calvin Tomkins, Childhood Neighbor and Friend of the Milhollands and Staff Writer (since 1960) for The New Yorker, New York, NY
Milholland in 1910 Strike
100th Anniversary of the Women's Factory Worker Strike of 1909-1910
Since
newspapers have been getting smaller, it may be no surprise that fewer
anniversary events are being noted. One anniversary that has
nearly slipped by unnoticed is the Women's Factory Workers Strike that
started in 1909 and ended in February 1910, 100 years ago.
The
strike was started over the atrocious conditions of female factory
workers in New York City and Philadelphia. At the heart of it was
little Local 25 of the ILGWU, which itself was just three years old.
Local 25 started with barely 100 members in early 1909, and was living
from hand to mouth. But the courage of the young Italian Catholic and
Eastern European Jewish girls grew and they got the support of women
who were better situated, people like Alva Belmont and Clara Lemlich
and... Inez Milholland, who had just graduated from Vassar and was
embarked on her law school courses at NYU (after having been accepted
by the faculty of the Harvard Law School but then rejected by the
administration on the grounds that she was a woman, as Phyllis Eckhaus
wrote in an article for the November-December 1994 issue of Harvard Magazine).
Two
books document the importance of the strike and the role that Inez
Milholland played in support of it. The number of striking
women swelled to the tens of thousands before ending in February 2010.
The strike not only was crucial in establishing women in the U.S. labor
movement, it emboldened the men's unions. One of the two books is by
Joan Dash, "We Shall Not Be Moved: The Women's Factory Strike of
1909," Scholastic, 1996 (see mentions of Inez on eight different
pages). The other is by Washington Post writer David von Drehle,
"Triangle: The Fire that Changed America," Atlantic Monthly Press,
2009. The 99th anniversary of the Triangle Fire, which was located next
door to the NYU building where Inez Milholland was studying law, is
next month, on March 25.
Ironically, given the memories of labor
conditions 100 years ago, a February 10, 2010 report from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (USDL-10-0170) reports that work stoppages (strikes or
lockouts) have declined to a trickle. In 2009 fewer work stoppages
in the United States occurred than in any year since the statistical
series began in 1947. In 2000-2009 there were an average of
approximately 20 major stoppages (involving at least 1,000 employees
and at least one shift) per year. This was down from an average of 35 per year
in the 1990s and 83 per year in the 1980s.
