Category Archives: One Woman Against War

‘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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Interview with Montana native Kevin S. Giles who writes books about his home state

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Photo shows Kevin S. Giles

Kevin S. Giles is a native Montanan and longtime newspaper journalist.

You’ve published a biography of Jeannette Rankin. Who was she?

¶ History knows her as the first woman elected to Congress. She went to the US House of Representatives in 1916. She was a fierce suffragist, led Montana to approving suffrage in 1914, and rode that momentum to Congress. At that time only 10 states had given women the right to vote. Once Montanans elected Rankin, national suffragists saw her as the voice in Congress who would achieve a federal suffrage amendment.

Did that work out?

¶ Unfortunately for the suffragists, no. World War I got in the way. But even as Congress preoccupied itself with war legislation, Rankin led a push for the federal amendment. The House approved it but the Senate didn’t, by a narrow margin, and it wasn’t until the next Congress that the amendment got enough votes and went to the states for ratification. Some people fault Rankin for failing to secure suffrage by federal amendment in those two years she served in the House. I think the opposite.There’s substantial proof that Rankin’s success at being elected astonished many Americans, the first woman ever, and she achieved more in that term than anybody expected. During that war, Congress didn’t spend much time considering the needs of women and children. That was Rankin’s principal platform, so you can see her challenges beyond the obvious one of being the only woman in the entire male Congress.

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From Kevin S. Giles: What I said about my original Jeannette Rankin biography

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Photo shows author Kevin S. Giles

This is how I looked at the time I published the first edition of my Jeannette Rankin, entitled “Flight of the Dove.” The second edition is renamed “One Woman Against War: the Jeannette Rankin Story.”

These are my actual quotes that I pulled from newspaper and broadcast interviews after I published the original Flight of the Dove. I would say much the same thing today about my new edition, which I retitled, One Woman Against War, but add this: “Pacifists like Jeannette Rankin perpetually live in the shadow of war, devoting their entire lives to shining sunlight on the prospect of peace.”

¶ “Why was she so terribly lonely?”

¶ “My parents have been great, too, always being interested in the book and telling everybody about it. They thought maybe I was a little too radical in college, but never once have they criticized me for writing about a woman who was considered radical in her time.”

Order Kevin's books now and receive a 10% discount by entering code "SaveOnKevinsBooks"

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

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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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Vietnam-era Jeannette Rankin peace parade: Thousands of voices, speaking as one

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Photo shows first page of Jeannette Rankin book

The updated Jeannette Rankin biography, by Kevin S. Giles, starts with her participation in a peace protest at the US Capitol in 1968. She’s was one of America’s best-known pacifists.

(This is selected from the first chapter of One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story. A second selection will appear next week. © Kevin S. Giles)

By Kevin S. Giles

It wasn’t a convenient morning. Snow had fallen overnight, filling the streets surrounding the United States Capitol with slush and mud. Several thousand women wearing boots and overcoats gathered around an old woman in the gray light outside Union Station. She stood shivering, hardly resembling a historical figure, at first appearing long past her prime. Eyeglasses loomed over her wrinkled face. The old woman watched the milling crowd while organizers called activists into place, state by state, and handed them protest banners. They would march on the Capitol to protest the war in Vietnam. They would decry the slaughter of young men, profiteering by corporations with fat defense contracts, congressional neglect of social and economic needs at home. They would take to the streets to beseech their government to listen to their grievances. They wanted change. They wanted peace. It all seemed hauntingly familiar to this diminutive octogenarian named Jeannette Rankin.

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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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