Tag Archives: Jeannette Rankin

Author Kevin S. Giles: Famous people I knew, or saw, and a few I wish I had met

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By Kevin S. Giles

Soon after Dances With Wolves won Best Picture, as I drank beer in a Tucson hotel with fellow newspaper editors, a man watching fish in the nearby aquarium caught our attention. I recognized him even without the feathers.

He resembled Graham Greene, who played Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner’s epic. That very moment, Beau Bridges walked past with a woman on each arm. He wore a tuxedo. I went to the front desk to claim my room. A tall silver-haired man stood next to me. He was Lloyd Bridges, dad to Beau and Jeff, and star of Sea Hunt, a 1960s TV drama I watched in boyhood. Minutes later, I went to the elevator.

“Hold the door!” someone called. In walked Terrance Knox, an actor from TV’s St. Elsewhere and a subsequent Vietnam war drama, Tour of Duty. He stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Terry,” he greeted me. Being face to face with the TV doctor who became a serial rapist in the basement morgue of the St. Eligius hospital (the actual name of St. Elsewhere) gave me pause.

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‘Pink Wave’ of 2018 started with the first woman, a Montanan, elected to Congress

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By Kevin S. Giles

(Details in this story come from my book, One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story, which examines the life and times of a historical figure whose involvement in American politics spanned 60 years.)

What a difference a century (and two years) makes.

When Montana’s Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress, she broke a gender barrier that had frustrated American women since before the Civil War.

History shows that Rankin’s remarkable election to the US House of Representatives in 1916 didn’t unleash an immediate flood of female candidates hoping to achieve the same thing. Through the 1920s, after the Nineteenth Amendment gave all American women the right to vote, relatively few women went to Congress. (Not until 1924 were indigenous people granted the right to vote.)

Now look, in 2018.

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First congresswoman Jeannette Rankin was an early opponent of the Electoral College

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Kevin S. Giles, a native of Deer Lodge, Mont., authored the biography, One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story. It tells of the pacifist convictions of the first woman elected to Congress. Her campaign came just two years after Montana legislators gave women the right to vote. This essay first appeared on lastbestnews.com, a Montana independent news site.

By Kevin S. Giles

Imagine being the first woman elected to Congress, taking a seat in the US House amid a sea of men on the eve of President Wilson’s appeal to declare war on Germany.

Jeannette Rankin voted no.

Imagine being elected a second time to Congress while Hitler’s Germany rampaged through Europe. Then came Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt asked for a war declaration against Japan.

Again, Rankin voted no.

BUY! One Woman Against War

Rankin, of Montana, became a full-fledged pacifist between the world wars. She believed she was voting the will of her constituents back home, which was partly true, but she also objected to government’s close ties to corporations that profited from war.

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How it all began: A suffragist, an inspiration and a biography about Jeannette Rankin

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Photo shows Montana suffragist

Suffragist Belle Fligelman Winestine was the inspiration for Flight of the Dove, the Jeannette Rankin biography written by Kevin S. Giles. He published a new and expanded edition in October 2016, entitled One Woman Against War. This photo was taken at a book signing ceremony at the Montana Historical Society. Photo by Gene Fischer

(Today we’re going back to tell about my original biography of Jeannette Rankin, Flight of the Dove. This story, which appeared in the Missoulian many years ago, explains how I got started researching Rankin’s life and writing the first book. The roots of my new and expanded edition, One Woman Against War, can be traced to when I met Belle Fligelman Winestine, an early Montana suffragist. – Kevin S. Giles)

By Deirdre McNamer.

Life is sometimes like that. Two events come together in an uncanny way and you suddenly find yourself on a whole new tack.

For Helena newsman Kevin Giles, the coincidence took place one day in October 1976. Giles, who was editor of the Independent Record’s lifestyle section, had just interviewed Belle Fligelman Winestine, a tiny, fiery octogenarian who had been a leader in the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s.

Winestine had also served as administrative secretary to Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin in 1917, and she convinced Giles that the really INTERESTING story would be an account of Rankin’s life and work.

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About that pacifist, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin from Montana …

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Photo shows Jeanmarie Bishop

Jeanmarie Bishop has performed dozens of roles in regional theatre and stock in the US and Canada and began directing while still in her teens. Jeanmarie is founding artistic director of the Nevada Shakespeare Company, from which she retired in 2008. She lives in Arizona, where she continues to act and write.

(I wrote this as the foreword for Jeanmarie Bishop’s new published play about Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. “Tens of thousands have seen the play in theatres, meeting halls and living rooms throughout the world,” Bishop writes.)

By Kevin S. Giles

It’s been said that to truly understand Jeannette Rankin requires practicing what drove her through a lifelong pursuit of pacifism. Otherwise we stare at her through a looking glass from afar, seeing eventful mileposts but never breathing the rarefied air of her innermost thoughts. Yes, Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. She was the only American to vote against two world wars. She was widely vilified for doing that, but why?

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In Helena, Montana, it was Louise Rankin Galt helping out a young author

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By Kevin S. Giles

When I began researching the life of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, I went to the law offices of Louise Rankin Galt. She was a block off Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana, continuing the practice she once shared with her late husband, Wellington Rankin.

In the years after Wellington’s death, Louise had married rancher Jack Galt, but she very much remained a link to the famous Rankin family.

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