Schenken Suzanne O’Dea. From Suffrage to the Senate: An Encyclopedia of American Women in Politics (2 Volumes)

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Rambaut, Mary Lucinda Bonney

See Bonney, Mary Lucinda

Rankin, Jeannette Pickering (1880–1973)

Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana was the first woman to serve in

the U.S. Congress. When Rankin won the race for the U.S. House of Rep-

resentatives in 1916, women in three-fourths of the states still did not have

full suffrage rights. She served from 4 March 1917 to 3 March 1919 and

from 3 January 1941 to 3 January 1943. A devoted peace advocate, she was

the only person to vote against U.S. entry into both World War I and

World War II.

Born near Missoula, Montana, Jeannette Rankin was the eldest

daughter in a prosperous ranching family. Early in her life, Rankin wrote

in her journal: “Go! Go! Go! It makes no difference where just so you go!”

and she did. She entered the University of Montana in 1898, graduated

with a degree in biology in 1902, and began teaching school. She soon de-

cided that teaching was not for her and began traveling across the coun-

try looking for her life’s work.

A trip to Boston exposed her to urban poverty and the squalor in

which poor families lived, especially women and children. From 1904 until

1908, Rankin sought to help remedy the problems of poverty through so-

cial work in several cities, including New York and San Francisco. By 1913,

she had concluded that without the vote women could not make substan-

tial societal change and had turned her efforts toward woman suffrage. She

worked in a number of states, including her home state of Montana, which

passed a state constitutional amendment for woman suffrage in 1914.

A Progressive Republican, she decided to run for the U.S. Congress

in 1916. She began her campaign with an important advantage. Through

her travels for the suffrage amendment, Rankin had developed a wide base

of supporters who worked on her campaign.

Her primary campaign theme was the need for attention to children’s

well-being, which was consistent with her earlier social work. One example

she used to demonstrate the lack of interest in children was that the federal

government spent $300,000 a year for research on pig fodder but only

$30,000 a year to study children’s needs. She promised to work for an

amendment to the U.S. Constitution for full woman suffrage. Another cam-

paign issue involved the war raging in Europe. Americans were not yet in-

volved in World War I, but the possibility of it appeared increasingly great.

Rankin pledged that she would not vote to send Montana boys to war.

Rankin took her seat in Congress on 2 April 1917, and on 6 April

Congress voted on a declaration of war. Rankin carefully deliberated

Rankin, Jeannette Pickering 559

about how she would vote. Because she

was the first woman to serve in Congress,

some people regarded her as a test of

whether or not women should be there. If

she voted against war, it might be inter-

preted as proof that women were weak and

could not make difficult decisions. If she

voted for war, she would be breaking her

campaign pledge to stay out of it. She

voted against war, along with fifty-five

male members of the House of Represen-

tatives. She later said being the first

woman elected to Congress was less signif-

icant than being “the first woman who was

ever asked what she thought about war

[and] said ‘no!’”

Rankin supported several measures

that addressed women’s concerns. She

passed a bill to regulate the hours and con-

ditions for women workers at the U.S. Mint, protective labor legislation

that social reformers of the time favored. She developed support for

woman suffrage and introduced a bill to end child labor. Her bill to pro-

vide health care and instruction for mothers became the Sheppard-

Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, and she helped

build support for the Cable Act of 1922, giving women citizenship rights

regardless of their marital status or the citizenship of their husband.

She decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 1918 but lost in the Repub-

lican primary. Her vote against war had turned voters against her.

Rankin’s commitment to peace became clear in her work over the next

twenty years. She devoted herself to lobbying Congress and organizing

people to work for peace.

Her work in peace issues once again attracted Montana voters’ sup-

port in 1940, when she ran for the U.S. House of Representatives the sec-

ond time. As in 1916, Europe was at war, and Americans were debating

whether or not to enter World War II. Rankin campaigned on peace

themes and won her seat in Congress. True to her beliefs, when Congress

voted on whether or not to enter the war, she voted no. She was the only

person in the House or the Senate to cast a no vote and the only person in

the United States to vote against both world wars. Widely ridiculed for

having kept her campaign promises, she did not run again in 1942.

During the Vietnam War, she joined the peace protests against it. As

the leader of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, she marched in Washington,

560 Rankin, Jeannette Pickering

Representative Jean-

nette Rankin (R-MT)

was the only member

of Congress to vote

against both world

wars, for which she

had to have a police

escort to ensure her

safety (Library of

Congress)

D.C., with other protesters in an antiwar rally in 1968. That same year, she

considered running for Congress for the third time, but poor health made

her abandon those plans. She was eighty-eight years old. She died five

years later, in 1973, in Carmel, California.

See also Congress, Women in; Suffrage

References Anderson, “Steps to Political Equality: Woman Suffrage and

Electoral Politics in the Lives of Emily Newell Blair, Anne Henrietta Martin,

and Jeannette Rankin” (1997); Kaptur, Women of Congress: A Twentieth

Century Odyssey (1996).

Rape

With the emergence of the modern feminist movement in the 1960s,

women focused attention on rape, reports on it, prosecutions of it, and

laws relating to it. The topic began to receive serious attention through the

efforts of Susan Brownmiller, who was a leader in the New York Radical

Women’s decisions to hold a speak-out and a conference in 1971 on the

topic. These events contributed to raising women’s consciousness about

rape, served as forums for analyzing societal assumptions about it, and

provided some of the inspiration for Brownmiller’s landmark study of it.

In Against Our Will (1975), Brownmiller traced the social and legal history

of rape, arguing that rape “is an exercise in power” and not an act of pas-

sion. She explained that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious

process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

The fear affected the dailiness of women’s lives, including their willingness

to live alone, walk outside alone at night, or leave their windows open.

Rape is one of the most underreported of crimes—approximately

132,000 women report that they have been victims of rape or of attempted

rape every year, but it is estimated that two to six times that number of

women are raped but do not report it. The crime is generally not reported

for several reasons, including women’s fear and embarrassment and their

knowledge that prosecutors are often reluctant to file charges and that

prosecutions are difficult to obtain.

Women often find the experience of dealing with law enforcement

officials degrading and traumatic, contributing to their resistance to con-

tinuing with the reporting process. Because women had so few options at

the time the feminist movement began, feminists opened rape crisis hot-

lines and rape crisis centers, with the first hotline opening in Washington,

D.C., in 1972 and hundreds more opening over the next four years. The

centers generally provide assistance to rape victims, accompany them to

police stations, and serve as advocates for them after the attack. Centers

also offer self-defense classes, rape prevention seminars, support groups,

and training for professionals.

Rape 561

In the 1970s, feminists also began to change state laws related to rape.

Several states had special rules of evidence in rape trials, including requir-

ing corroborating evidence in addition to the woman’s testimony. To

prove that force was involved and that the woman had resisted, the evi-

dence could include a weapon, bruises, or torn clothing. To prove that

penetration had occurred, possible evidence included vaginal tears,

bruises, and sperm. The courts permitted testimony about the woman’s

prior sexual history as relevant to the issue of consent, and the victim’s at-

tire could be part of the defense, which could assert that revealing or sexy

clothing constituted an invitation to be assaulted, the “she asked for it” de-

fense. In addition, judges’ instructions to juries included the caution ar-

ticulated by a seventeenth-century jurist: “Rape is an accusation easily to

be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended.”

Since the 1970s, every state in the country has revised its rape laws,

with some of the states amending them several times to move the empha-

sis from the victim’s behavior and clothing to the defendant’s actions. The

requirement that women resist the attack and examinations of victims’

behavior and prior sexual activity, with some exceptions, and the seven-

teenth-century instructions to the jury have been dropped in most states.

As states changed their laws, they also renamed the offense sexual assault

and made it gender-neutral.

In the 1970s, because rape was defined as “forcible penetration of an

act of sexual intercourse on the body of a woman not the man’s wife,”

forced sex between a husband and wife was legal, and even if she was in-

jured, no law had been broken. Whether a state labeled forcible sex as rape

or as sexual assault, there was often a marital exemption, but by the 1990s,

that exemption had been eliminated in almost every state. In addition,

sexual assault laws covered cohabitants and people on dates.

In the 1990s, an increasing number of women reported that they had

been raped after they had been drugged. An odorless, colorless, tasteless

drug, Rohypnol relaxes people so that resistance is almost impossible and

it may lead to memory loss. By secretly placing the drug in a drink, rapists

disarmed their intended victims. In 1996, Congress increased the penal-

ties for giving drugs, especially Rohypnol, to a person without the person’s

knowledge and with the intent to commit a violent crime. In addition,

college safety groups and other organizations produced warnings to alert

women of the potential danger.

See also Feminist Movement; New York Radical Women

References Baer, Women in American Law: The Struggle toward Equality from

the New Deal to the Present (1996); Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men,

Women, and Rape (1975); Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 104th Congress,

562 Rape

2nd Session...1996 (1997); Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the

1970s (1988).

Ray, Dixy Lee (1914–1994)

Democrat Dixy Lee Ray was governor of Washington from 1977 to 1981.

President Richard Nixon appointed her to the Atomic Energy Commis-

sion in 1972, and she chaired it from 1973 to 1975. A strong supporter of

nuclear power, she believed that nuclear power plants were safe and that

mass destruction from an accident was unlikely. When the Atomic Energy

Commission’s responsibilities were transferred to another agency, Presi-

dent Gerald Ford appointed Ray assistant secretary of state for oceans, in-

ternational environmental, and scientific affairs. After leaving the federal

government, Ray ran for governor of the state of Washington. Governor

Ray was viewed as friendly to business and was criticized by environmen-

talists for her support of nuclear power and its development. Ray ran for

a second term but lost in the primary election.

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Dixy Lee Ray earned her bachelor’s de-

gree from Mills College in 1937 and her doctorate from Stanford Univer-

sity in 1945. Ray taught in Oakland, California, from 1938 to 1942. She

was an associate professor of zoology at the University of Washington

from 1945 to 1976.