{"id":15275,"date":"2016-12-08T21:23:32","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T04:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=15275"},"modified":"2016-12-27T08:50:16","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T15:50:16","slug":"waiting-for-another-chance-to-remember-rankin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/12\/waiting-for-another-chance-to-remember-rankin\/","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for another chance to remember Rankin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeanette<\/a>

Jeanette Rankin<\/p><\/div>\n

School District 2 passed up an opportunity last year to name a new middle school after Jeannette Rankin, opting instead for Bataan Death March survivor and longtime Billings artist Ben Steele. The vote was understandable, especially since it gave the community a chance to bestow one last honor on Steele, who died in September.<\/p>\n

But there will be other schools, and other buildings, and one can only hope that Rankin will be remembered the next time a naming opportunity comes up. Rankin, a Missoula native, not only was the first woman elected to Congress, she was the only woman able to cast a vote in Congress for the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.<\/p>\n

A new article in the Washington Post<\/a> reminds us that Rankin sacrificed her political career twice to vote against world wars. And if her votes may have been ill considered, her motives were pure.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a woman, I can\u2019t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else,\u201d she said to boos on Dec. 8, 1941, as the House of Representatives voted 388 to 1 against her.<\/p>\n

A new book<\/a> about America\u2019s entry into World War I chronicles Rankin\u2019s later years: \u201cShe moved to a dirt-floor house in Georgia, kept up her love for cars, always made sure to dress well, and in later years wore an ash-blond wig. In 1968, at the age of 87, she led a march of several thousand women on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. They called themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018We\u2019ve done all the damage we can possibly do in Vietnam,\u2019 she told the New York Times. \u2018You can\u2019t settle disputes by shooting nice young men.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

There may never have been a time in American history when we more urgently needed a reminder of what it means to put country ahead of personal political gain. No one teaches us that lesson better than Jeannette Rankin.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

School District 2 passed up an opportunity last year to name a new middle school after Jeannette Rankin, opting instead for Bataan Death March survivor and longtime Billings artist Ben Steele. The vote was understandable, especially since it gave the community a chance to bestow one last honor on Steele, who died in September. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":15276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[153,2722],"class_list":["post-15275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-ben-steele","tag-jeanette-rankin","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}