Women’s History Month: A Major Women’s Anniversary Approaches
In not quite two
weeks, on April 2nd, we will commemorate the 100th
Anniversary of the swearing in of the first woman to serve in the U.S.
Congress, Jeannette Rankin. This is clearly
a major event in American history.
I shared this fact
with two different friends in entirely unrelated conversations last week, and they
had exactly the same reactions: they
immediately blurted out, “she was in Congress before she could even
vote?!” Well, no, it didn’t work that
way, and how it did work is part of Jeannette Rankin’s story.
Jeannette Rankin
was born in Missoula, Montana on June 11, 1880.
Her father was a rancher and her mother a schoolteacher. She was the eldest of six children: five
daughters and one son. Besides helping
with her younger siblings, Jeannette did her daily outdoor work and farm chores
while helping to maintain the machinery at the ranch. Once, she built a wooden sidewalk for one of
her father’s buildings all by herself. Years
later, she said that as a child she had observed that women worked side by side
with men as equals in the 1890s western frontier, but they did not have an
equal political voice and were denied legal voting rights.
After high school,
Jeannette attended the University of Montana.
She worked as a seamstress and a teacher and also tried social
work. Her social work experience was of
sufficient interest that she furthered her studies at the New York School of
Philanthropy, which later became the Columbia University School of Social Work. She also attended the University of
Washington in Seattle. At this last,
Jeannette became active in the women’s suffrage movement. Further, in 1910, one of her associates in
this work, Denver news reporter and women’s rights activist Minnie J. Reynolds,
persuaded Rankin that pacifism was an inherent part of feminism. “The women
produce the boys and the men take them off and kill them in war,” Reynolds
argued. Rankin’s reading of Benjamin
Kidd’s 1918 book, The Science of Power, solidified her commitment
to Reynold’s feminist-pacifist ideology. Kidd found in men a natural
inclination to battle while he found in women a preference for peaceful
settling of disputes.
Jeannette had been
active in the efforts in Washington State to grant voting rights to women, and
those efforts succeeded in 1910, as Washington became the fifth state to allow
women to vote. She then moved home to
Montana, where she started working toward similar rights there. Her efforts were instrumental in achieving that
goal in 1914, and Montana became the tenth state where women could vote. Then Jeannette decided to try running for
Congress. Her brother, a lawyer and
active in state Republican politics, helped finance and manage her campaign. Montana had two Representatives who served a
single state-wide “at-large” district.
In the election on November 7, 1916, of six candidates, Jeannette
received the second highest vote total, 76,932, and 7,567 fewer than the
front-runner. She got 9,958 more than
the third highest vote-getter, so her performance was quite respectable. The following April 2, 1917, when the 65th
Congress convened, she was greeted with enthusiastic applause as she took her
seat in the House.
This was all in the
midst of World War I. In the opening
days of April, newly elected President Woodrow Wilson asked for a Declaration
of War. This was granted on April 6; the
vote in the House was 373 to 50. Ms.
Rankin was among the 50 “no” votes. Because she was the only woman, her vote was
all got considerable attention, not all of it complimentary. Her other distinction in her one term in the
House in that era was to initiate the legislation and help lead the push for
passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which would give
women the right to vote everywhere in the country. The House passed this amendment twice during
1918, but each time the Senate narrowly voted it down. It finally passed both Houses of Congress in
1919, after Rankin had left the House, and was ratified in late August 1920.
Jeannette Rankin
ran for Senate in 1918, but lost in the Republican primary. She then bought a small farm in Georgia and
became a public speaker and lobbyist on behalf of peace and the prevention of
war. During that time, of course, World
War II developed, and she returned to Montana to run for the House again in 1940,
at age 60. Pearl Harbor happened on
December 7, 1941, and the vote in Congress to declare war Japan took place on
December 8. The vote in the Senate was
unanimous and in the House, it was 388 to 1.
Asked to change her vote – actually by then-Representative Everett
Dirksen – Ms. Rankin said, “As a woman, I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send
anyone else.” Reaction to her NO vote
was so disruptive that she had to take shelter in a phonebooth in the Capitol Building
until security officers could escort her out. This ended her political
career.
She did consider
running again, however, in 1972, when she was 92, in order to argue against
Viet Nam involvement, but her health would not permit. She died in Carmel, California, on May 18,
1973. While her pacifist sentiments had
brought the most publicity in later years, she said in 1972 the she hoped she
would be remembered most for being “the only woman who ever voted to give women
the right to vote."
* * * * *
I composed this narrative for an event on
March 19 at my home parish, St. Ann & the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn,
NY. Called “Unsung Heroines”, this is
becoming an annual Women’s History Month commemoration, celebrating notable
women who receive relatively little recognition. Among the other women lauded in parishioner
presentations were Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman ordained in the Anglican
Communion and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer precursor to Chuck Berry
and other rock-‘n-roll stars.
Presentations this year also included a couple of other suffragettes.
Sources for the material on Jeannette
Rankin presented here include the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Rankin,
her entry in the U.S. House of Representatives “History” section: http://history.house.gov/People/Listing/R/RANKIN,-Jeannette-(R000055)/
and – interestingly – an entry in the U.S. Senate history section: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Jeannette_Rankin.htm. That selection begins, “No history of
American representative government could properly be written without a major
reference to Representative Jeannette Rankin.” Detail on her pacifist positions is given in http://www.historynet.com/jeanette-rankin-no-vote.htm.
Obviously, Ms. Rankin and her accomplishments have
often been “sung”. But the proximity of
the anniversary gave ample justification for including her in a celebration of
Unsung Heroines.
Labels: American Society, Government Policies, People
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home