Since 2016,
Jeanine Michna-Bales has been researching the Suffrage chapter of American history. The project champions a little-known figure who was at the forefront of the suffrage movement in the early 20th century, Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886 – 1916). Organizing started leading marches on horseback while dressed in white, Milholland helped form the National Woman’s Party. The group mounted a radical campaign for women’s suffrage in the Western states just prior to the 1916 Presidential election in which President Wilson was running for reelection. At that time only 12 states, all in the west, allowed women the full right to vote. Hundreds of women were asked to travel west to appeal to the newly empowered women voters to put aside all other political agendas and unite behind their non-voting sisters back east.