Or at least my favorite vintage magazine, Modern Priscilla does.
I recently picked up a lot of 11 more magazines, which arrived tonight, so I was flipping through and there was a page from one in 1918 that had several notable women all giving opinions on the topic at hand.
Under one of the pictures I see the words 'Miss Jeannette Rankin adds to her other distinctions that of being the first women to sit in the Federal Congress of the United States'
I boggle for a moment, and recheck the date on the cover, September 1918.
Ok, that is just a tiny bit odd being so close to when the right to vote was granted...so I go out to the internet to check this all out.
Sure enough, google 'first woman in congress' and Miss Rankin pops up. And she is a doozy of a woman, and I wonder why I have never ever heard of her.
She was elected to congress from Montana, where women had been given the right to vote in 1914. She was elected in 1916, and went to congress in 1917.
Only four days after taking office, Jeannette Rankin made history in yet another way: she voted against U.S. entry into World War I. She violated protocol by speaking during the roll call before casting her vote, announcing "I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war."
In 1917, she opened the congressional debate on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which passed the House in 1917 and the Senate in 1918, to become the 19th Amendment after it was ratified by the states.
But wait....there is more.
After her first term, Montana re-positioned its districts, leaving her in the lurch so to speak, and unable to be re-elected.
but she ran again 24 years later, on the eve of WWII and won and once again the vote for war came up. Rankin went on to announce, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”37 The war resolution passed the House 388–1.
This obviously ruined her political career, but she continued to be an activist for peace until she died and even considered running for senate again in the late 60's, in theory to vote against Vietnam.
She lived to be 92 and died in 1973.
I am aghast that I have never heard of her. Was I just not paying attention in High School?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Rankin
