The Marching Women

Marisa Lemma

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781641377805
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Part 1

Chapter 1

Trailblazing Women in Public Service and Activism

One thing I believe profoundly: We make our own history. The course of history is directed by the choices we make and our choices grow out of the ideas, the beliefs, the values, the dreams of the people.

—Eleanor Roosevelt3

When Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 2016, she made history. Never in the United States’ 228-year history had a woman been the nominee of a major political party. As she stood on the stage at the Democratic National Convention accepting her nomination, she said, “Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come. Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between. Happy for boys and men, too. Because when any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone.”4

Women have been activists and public servants for at least 150 years, and they have slowly been chipping away at all the barriers in their way. Studying the historic women who have stepped up to create change in their communities is, in my opinion, a fundamental part of our understanding of current activists and public servants. We would not be where we are today without these powerful women who came before. Understanding what they went through and what they did for us is vital.

Hillary Clinton was not the first woman to knock down a barrier and clear the way for everyone else. In fact, she wasn’t even the first woman to run for president. Over one hundred years earlier, in 1872, a woman named Victoria Woodhull ran for president as a member of the Equal Rights Party. She believed in women’s suffrage, equal rights, and “free love,” and though her campaign was unsuccessful, she paved the way for other women to run for president.5 In 2008, she was posthumously awarded the “Ronald H. Brown Trailblazer Award,” which celebrates women who were committed to “uplifting underrepresented groups and individuals.”6 Victoria Woodhull was truly a trailblazer for future generations of women.

One of those future daring women was Jeannette Rankin. In 1916, she became the first woman ever elected to Congress.7 Rankin was from Montana and born in 1880, nine years before Montana became a state. When she ran for Congress, she advocated for social welfare and suffrage and won one of Montana’s two seats in the House of Representatives. Her election victory came four years prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, so at the time she was the only woman with any federal political power. She knew this too, as she stated in her victory speech, “I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me.”8

Rankin, in her tenure as a congresswoman, was able to set the stage for other women to have political power. While she was in Congress, she created the Committee on Woman Suffrage and opened debate on an amendment granting this. She became the only woman who has ever voted to give women the right to vote.9

Since Rankin’s historic congressional seat, women have broken down other barriers to their participation in the federal government. In 1933, Frances Perkins became the first woman ever appointed to a presidential cabinet.10 She was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor for his entire tenure as president, and she was one of only two people who remained in the cabinet for all four terms.11 In this role, she helped to administer several aspects of the New Deal, including the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Social Security Act, two government programs that had a huge impact on the labor force in the US12 Since the pioneering Frances Perkins broke down this barrier eighty-six years ago, thirty-one other women have held cabinet secretary positions.13

It was only in more recent history that women first entered the judicial branch of the federal government. In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan. She became the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice and the first woman with any power to shoot down laws passed by Congress. Three women currently serve on the Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton; Sonia Sotomayor, appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama; and Elena Kagan, appointed in 2010, also by President Obama. These are the only three other women that have ever held this position.14

Women have made history at the state and local levels too, and these women, though less well-known than many of the national figures, are just as important. Getting involved locally can be an even better way to create change. I know from personal experience just how effective local governments can be. A couple of years ago, I worked in a state senator’s office, and I saw firsthand how much easier and more effective it was to create change at a local level.

In 1887, Susanna Madora Salter became the first woman elected as mayor in the United States.15 She was elected to serve the small town of Argonia, Kansas, which had about five hundred residents when she assumed office. Salter’s story is particularly moving because she didn’t even know she was on the ballot. A group of men that were against women’s involvement in politics put her name on the ballot and she didn’t know until the day of the election. Only after members of the Republican Party saw her name on the ballot and told her did she know what had happened. She agreed to accept the position if she won, so the Republican Party agreed to elect her to teach the men who put her name on the ballot a lesson.16 Her win makes the story even more satisfying, since she helped pave the way for other women who had people doubting their gender’s fitness for office.

Shortly after that, in 1892, Laura Eisenhuth was elected superintendent of public instruction in North Dakota, making her the first woman to ever be elected to a statewide office.17 This was a significant advancement because in North Dakota, women could only vote on matters of education, and the superintendent race was the only one they were able to vote in. When Eisenhuth first ran for this position in 1890, she made the argument that since women could vote in this race, they could surely run in it. Unfortunately, she lost that year, and she also lost her reelection bid in 1894. But with her two-year tenure she paved the way for so many other women t...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments