CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/14/2021

A timely meditation on voting rights in Jeanine Michna-Bales' 'Standing Together'

"Women Hold Up Half of the Sky" (2019) is reproduced from Standing Together: Inez Milholland's Final Campaign for Women's Suffrage, MW Editions’ new collection of recent and historic photographs, quotations and painstakingly researched archival materials by Jeanine Michna-Bales. At a time when voting rights are at the absolute forefront of national debate, this book—which retraces the pioneering women’s suffrage advocate Inez Milholland Boissevain’s grueling 1916 campaign across the Western US—conveys both immediately and poetically the heroic effort required to pass the 19th Amendment. In fact, Inez Milholland Boissevain gave her life for the cause. “Although the principle of equal rights is enshrined in America’s founding documents,” Michna-Bales writes, “those rights have historically been reserved for certain groups—mainly white men—and have been violently withheld from many people, most grievously from immigrants and Black and indigenous Americans.… It is clear that we still have work to do. And as Inez would have wished, I truly hope that we all continue to stand together, shoulder to shoulder, using our voices with courage and devotion as we move ‘forward out of error’ and ‘forward into light.’”