Irwin, Inez Haynes (1873–1970)

American suffragist, novelist and short-story writer. Born Inez Leonore Haynes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 2, 1873; died in Norwell, Massachusetts, onSeptember 25, 1970; one of ten children of Gideon Haynes and his second wife Emma Jane (Hopkins) Haynes; graduated from the Bowdoin Grammar School, Boston, 1887; attended the Girls' High School, Boston, 1887–90; graduated from Boston Normal School, 1892; attended Radcliffe College as a special student, 1897–1900; married Rufus Hamilton Gillmore (a newspaper reporter), on August 30, 1897 (divorced around 1913); married William Henry Irwin (a political journalist and biographer of Herbert Hoover), on February 1, 1916.

Selected writings:

June Jeopardy (1908); Maida's Little Shop (1910); Phoebe and Ernest (1910); Janey (1911); Phoebe, Ernest, and Cupid (1912); Angel Island (1914); The Ollivant Orphans (1915); The Californians (1916); The Lady of the Kingdoms (1917); The Happy Year (1919); The Native Son (1919); Maida's Little House (1921); Out of the Air (1921); The Story of the Woman's Party (1921); Gertrude Haviland's Divorce (1925); Maida's Little School (1926); Gideon (1927); P.D.F.R. (1928); Confessions of a Businessman's Wife (1931); Family Circle (1931): Youth Must Laugh (1932); Angels and Amazons (1933); Strange Harvest (1934); Murder Masquerade (1935); The Poison Cross (1936); Good Manners for Girls (1937); A Body Rolled Downstairs (1938); Maida's Little Island (1939); Maida's Little Camp (1940); Many Murders (1941); Maida's Little Village (1942); Maida's Little Houseboat (1943); Maida's Little Theatre (1946); The Women Swore Revenge (1946); Maida's Little Cabins (1947); Maida's Little Zoo (1949); Maida's Little Lighthouse (1951); Maida's Little Hospital (n.d.); Maida's Little Farm (n.d.); Maida's Little House Party (n.d.); Maida's Little Treasure Hunt (n.d.); Maida's Little Tree House (n.d.).

Writer and feminist Inez Irwin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where her parents had moved from New England to start a coffee business. When the venture failed, they returned to manage several hotels in Boston. Irwin grew up in a large, blended family and even as a child expressed concern about the life of drudgery that awaited her once she reached womanhood. (Her father, a widower, brought five children to his second marriage, which then produced ten more.) In grammar school, after writing a composition on the topic "Should Women Vote?," she became an ardent supporter of women's rights. Following her graduation from Boston Normal School, Irwin taught briefly before her marriage to Rufus Hamilton Gillmore, a newspaper reporter, in 1897. That same year, with Gillmore's encouragement, she entered Radcliffe College as a special student. There Irwin was drawn into the suffrage movement, and in 1900, with Maud Wood Park , she founded the Massachusetts College Equal Suffrage Association, which ultimately expanded into the National College Equal Suffrage League.

In 1900, Irwin and her husband moved to New York where she wrote short stories and magazine articles, and published her first novel, June Jeopardy (1908). After a lengthy European tour, Irwin became the fiction editor of Max Eastman's radical periodical The Masses and joined the new feminist society Heterodoxy, which put her in contact with many of the notable suffragists of her day. She also met and fell in love with William Henry Irwin, a California journalist who was then managing editor of McClure's magazine. She subsequently divorced her husband and, in 1916, married Irwin. Inez shared many professional interests with her new husband and, during World War I, accompanied him to Europe, writing articles from England, France, and Italy for several American magazines.

Returning to New York in 1918, Irwin became involved with the more radical National Woman's Party, serving on its advisory council and as its biographer. Her carefully documented and lively work, The Story of the Woman's Party (1921), provides the only written account of the party's activities. Irwin later undertook a more ambitious history, Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (1933).

Inez Irwin also continued to write fiction and children's books, the earliest of which included a series about orphaned children; another revolved around a brother and sister. According to Lynne Masel-Walters and Helen Loeb , Irwin's feminist fiction, written early in her career, has been undeservedly forgotten. In her long novel, The Lady of the Kingdoms (1917), Irwin used two heroines, one beautiful and one plain, to "examine the conventional moralities women have been forced into, as well as the unconventional, even 'immoral,' ones women have chosen for themselves." Irwin also wrote two novels dealing with the sensitive subject of divorce: Gertrude Haviland's Divorce (1925) and Gideon (1927).

Irwin won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1924 for "The Spring Flight," a short story about William Shakespeare's attempt to overcome writer's block before writing The Tempest. During the 1930s and 1940s, her output consisted of murder mysteries and children's books, including the popular "Maida" series, based on her own childhood.

Irwin supported a number of writers' associations, serving as president of the Authors Guild (1925–28) and of the Authors' League of America (1931–33). She was also vice president of the New York chapter of P.E.N. (1941–44). Following the death of her husband in 1948, Irwin retired to the couple's summer home in Scituate, Massachusetts, She died in a nursing home in 1970, at the age of 97.

sources:

Masel-Walters, Lynne, and Helen Loeb. "Inez Irwin," in Mainiero, Lina, ed. American Women Writers From Colonial Times to the Present. NY: Frederick Ungar, 1980.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, ed. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts