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.
It’s projected that when all the votes are counted, more than 100 women will represent their states in the 435-member House. That’s a record number. The US Senate will have at least 23 women among its 100 seats. Most of this year’s newcomers to Congress are Democrats, many of them women of color.
New Mexico and Kansas elected the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Michigan and Minnesota elected the first Muslim women, one of whom is the first Somali-American. Texas elected that state’s first Latinas, two of them. Connecticut and Massachusetts elected the first women of color to represent their states. New York and Iowa elected the youngest women, both 29, to serve in the House.
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The Pink Wave of 2018 included women who came to the United States as refugees, women who are lesbian parents, and women who are military veterans with distinguished records of service. Tennessee elected a Republican woman to the Senate, its first. More women were elected as governor, lieutenant governor, and to legislatures and local governments.
Back in 1916, our nation regarded Rankin’s election as an oddity. She was a suffragist, a rare women’s rights activist. How dare an upstart woman invade an important hall of men where they attended to the nation’s crucial decisions?
Intense newspaper coverage reflected common societal mores and values of the day. It was speculated when Rankin, then in her 30s, would marry. She reportedly excelled in baking lemon meringue pies, wore petticoats under her chaps, was known for feminine touches such as “dark wistful eyes” and “small and slender” hands, and surely would shrivel and cry when asked to reckon with serious matters of lawmaking.
Nonetheless, Jeannette Rankin rose to the ranks of famous American women overnight as the “Lady from Montana.” She came from one of the few states where men decided to allow women to vote. She came to Congress with a serious agenda to achieve suffrage by federal amendment, so all women could vote.
Rankin didn’t “come out of nowhere,” as we sometimes think of charismatic political candidates. She had campaigned across the country for women’s right to vote. She built her campaign for Congress on the precinct-by-precinct organization that won suffrage in Montana. Yes, women elected Rankin in Montana, but so did men.
“I feel that the strenuous fight for suffrage two years ago was well worth the discouragements and dark days we went through, if the new voters appreciate their franchise enough to be willing to push further their fight for representation in their government,” Rankin told her campaign workers in Montana.
To this day, Rankin remains the only woman elected to Congress from Montana. Kathleen Williams came close in 2018.
The first chapter of “One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story,” takes readers into the war protest under her name at the US Capitol in 1968. Rankin was asked how she proposed to bring American troops home from Vietnam. “The same way we got them there, by ships and planes,” she quipped.
When I researched One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story, I found dozens of examples of how people held Rankin to higher expectations than the men around her. That reaction continues to this day among some people.
Our nation, born in 1776, still struggles to recognize the full potential of Americans set apart by age, gender, color, disability and sexual orientation, among other distinctions.
Suffrage by federal amendment came a whopping 144 years after Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which said in part: “… that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Whether Jefferson intended “men” to include all Americans remains in dispute.
Change is slow. Today, 242 years after the declaration, salaries for women trail men even when they hold the same jobs. Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, too many Americans still are judged by the color of their skin, especially at the polls. Discrimination against older people continues in the workplace. Only recently did same-sex marriages become legal. Until a relative few years ago, people in wheelchairs couldn’t enter doors too narrow or find a way off curbs too high.
The centuries-long quest for equal representation is controversial. To this day, people who don’t walk in America’s traditional mainstream struggle to attain their constitutional rights in our free nation.
Rankin’s view in 1916, back when the United States was far less diverse, was that women would emerge in politics to represent issues men overlooked.
It didn’t happen as fast as she had hoped, but it’s happening now. This new wave of women in Congress, carrying on what Jeannette Rankin started, now can build on the ideals to which she dedicated her life.
Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.