Inez Milholland Boissevain (August 6, 1886 – November 25, 1916) was a leading American suffragist, lawyer, and peace activist.

In 1913, she led the dramatic Woman Suffrage Procession on horseback in advance of President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as a symbolic herald.

She was also a labor lawyer and a war correspondent, as well as a high-profile New Woman of the age, with her avant-garde lifestyle and belief in free love.

[2] Milholland spent summers on her family's land in Lewis, Essex County, New York; the property is now the Meadowmount School of Music.

The president of Vassar had forbidden suffrage meetings, but Milholland and others held regular "classes" on the issue, along with large protests and petitions.

Milholland was president of the campus Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which was dominated by women at the time and reflected their identification with the oppressed.

She became a leader and a popular speaker on the campaign circuit of the NWP, working closely with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.

[10] Milholland was later admitted to the bar and joined the New York law firm of Osborne, Lamb, and Garvan, handling criminal and divorce cases.

[11] On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Milholland, 26, made her most memorable appearance, at the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington D.C. which she had helped organize.

She believed women's votes could remove social ills such as sweatshops, tenements, prostitution, hunger, poverty, and child mortality.

She told men that they should not worry about the women in their lives as they were extending their sacred rights and duties to the whole country rather than inside the home.

"[15] Milholland traveled overseas to Italy at the beginning of World War I shortly after the RMS Lusitania had been torpedoed by a German U-boat.

Milholland worked to be allowed to visit the front lines in the war as she continued to write anti-war articles that led to her censure by the Italian government, which banned her from the country.

[17] She was also a leading figure on Henry Ford's ill-fated Peace Ship expedition of late 1915, steaming across the Atlantic with a team of pacifist campaigners who hoped to give impetus to a negotiated settlement to the First World War.

She loved the new dance crazes of the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear and enjoyed traveling to Paris and buying Parisian couture gowns.

On October 23, 1916, she collapsed in the middle of a speech in Los Angeles, California, at Blanchard Hall and was rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital.

[3] Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about Inez Milholland titled "Repetitions," which appears in his 1918 volume, Cornhuskers.

[29] The Inez Milholland Professorship of Civil Liberties at New York University School of Law, filled by Burt Neuborne, was named in her honor.