By Robbie Gamble
When I was seven years old, my parents escorted me into a room in a retirement home in Carmel, CA, to meet an old friend of the family. She was a slight, elderly woman with a friendly face and a clear strong voice, and she knew how to set a fidgety, slightly precocious boy at ease. We talked for a few minutes about what I was doing in school and the books I liked to read. She shook my hand, and we moved on. There was something about her that was memorable; I couldn’t forget her. Her name was Jeannette Rankin.
Years later I learned that she was the first woman ever elected to Congress, in 1916, from the state of Montana, four years before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which enshrined universal voting rights for women (Montana was an early state to adopt suffrage). An ardent feminist and pacifist, she voted with a small bloc of representatives against entry into World War I, and subsequently lost her seat. Re-elected to the House in 1940, she was the sole legislator to vote against entry into World War II. In and out of office, she fought for gender equality and civil rights for six decades. She said her proudest achievement was being on the floor of Congress to cast an affirmative vote on the original House resolution for the Nineteenth Amendment as “the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.”
I’m fifty-six now, and it boggles my mind that I had the opportunity, within my short lifespan, to shake hands with the first woman who ever stepped onto the floor of Congress as a legislator, exactly one hundred years ago. I’ve thought a lot about Jeannette Rankin during this recent brutish election cycle, the prejudice and intimidation she must have endured as the first woman in an all-male bastion, the patience and endurance she needed to persevere in the struggle for universal suffrage, for civil rights, for peace. I look at Hillary Clinton’s tortuous campaign, the obstacles and the misogyny that she had to endure, and it seems like this nation, which appeared to be on the verge of electing our first woman to the Presidency, has come a long ways in the last hundred years, and yet hardly any distance at all. I’m proud and sad and disgusted all at once.
When I stepped into the booth on November 8th to mark my ballot, I was thinking about Jeannette Rankin, and all of us, women and men alike, who got to stand on her courageous shoulders, trying to break up that damn glass ceiling. The ceiling is still intact, but the fissures run deep, and I draw inspiration from her example of chipping away and speaking out over the long haul, not losing hope despite the setbacks of two world wars and countless other abominations, believing that justice and peace and equality will prevail if we continue to work for them.
She once said, “If I had to live my life over, I’d do it all again, but this time I’d be nastier.” Let’s keep going, nastily if need be, and with determination.
Robbie Gamble is currently completing an MFA in poetry at Lesley University. He works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, MA.
Learn more about Jeannette Rankin.
Reading recommendation: The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History, edited by Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Steinem.
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