Political Quotes

“last week, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Congress passing the 19th Amendment. This week, coincidentally enough, we celebrate the birthday of the only woman to vote on the 19th Amendment, Montana's own Jeannette Rankin. Jeannette Rankin, who helped women in Montana and Washington, earned the right to vote in 1914, 3 years before she became the first woman elected to Congress and 5 years before she helped pass the 19th Amendment, making her the only woman to vote for nationwide women's suffrage. I say ``nationwide'' because before Congress passed the 19th Amendment, women had already won the right to vote in more than a dozen States, almost all of which were west of the Mississippi. And that was no accident. The demands of frontier life were such that men and women often had to work side by side in order to meet those demands, and they still do that today. So it is no surprise that it was a western woman who led the effort on the House floor to pass a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. As a freshman Member of the minority party, Rankin was denied the chairmanship of the newly established Woman Suffrage Committee, but she was named ranking member. The group went to work drafting a women's suffrage amendment on the morning of January 10, 1918. The Capitol was crowded with people to hopefully secure a seat in the House Gallery for the suffrage debate.…”