March is Women’s History Month, so I think it’s a good time to have a brief look at some of the women in the history of March 4, specifically. It was March 4, 1917 that Jeannette Rankin became the first female member of the US House of Representatives. She was actually the first woman to hold any federal office in the US. She was elected in Montana, and is still the only woman Montana has ever elected to Congress.
Rankin was far ahead of her time — she advocated women’s right to vote for years. You might notice that when she was elected to Congress in 1917, it was three years before the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing that right. Montana granted women the right to vote in 1914, partly because of Rankin’s efforts. But when she was elected to Congress, it meant that at least one woman had the right to vote on national legislation, but women in general didn’t have the right to vote nationally.
She had strong principles, and one of them was pacifism. She was one of only 50 representatives to vote against declaring war on Germany in World War I. Then after being elected to Congress again in 1940, she was the only member to vote against declaring war on Japan. “As a woman,” she said, “I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” As you might expect, she came in for quite a bit of criticism over this. But at least one prominent politician, William White, said “Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it.” The statue of Rankin in the Statuary Hall in the US Capitol is titled I Cannot Vote for War. But she would have wanted it to say something else. In 1972 she said “If I am remembered for no other act, I want to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.”
A few years after Jeannette Rankin became part of the legislative branch of the US government, Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in the Executive Branch when she became the Secretary of Labor in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet, on March 4, 1933. She kept the post for Roosevelt’s entire time in office (one of only two cabinet members to accomplish that). Probably the most notable project she worked on was formulating the original Social Security program. She also developed New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and another one you might not have heard of: the She-She-She Camps. They were a counterpart to the Civilian Conservation Corps; camps for unemployed women willing to work in forestry and related fields. They provided housing and work for over 8,500 women during the Great Depression. In her spare time, she also championed the creation of the federal minimum wage and child labor laws. She appears in fiction too — in the Broadway version of Annie, Frances Perkins is a character in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. In the musical, Roosevelt orders he to sing Tomorrow along with Annie herself. There’s no record of the real-life Roosevelt requesting the real-life Perkins to sing or dance though. In fact she was often described as “cool and aloof.” As the first woman in a presidential cabinet, that was probably necessary.
Rebecca Gratz, born on March 4, 1781, never went into government. Instead she established the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances. It was a charitable organization to help families who had lost male heads of households in the US Revolutionary War. She managed that at the age of 20. Then a few years later she founded the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum to care for homeless and parentless children. As if that wasn’t enough, she founded the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society to support Jewish women whose husbands had died or become disabled. She never married, which makes her accomplishments (as a single woman) in the 18th and 19th centuries all the more remarkable.
Philanthropic work isn’t the only route to accomplishment. Emma Richter was also born on March 4, in 1888, and her route to significance was science. She wasn’t an academically-trained paleontologist — nope, she just volunteered at the Senckenberg Museum near her home in Germany. And when I say she volunteered, I mean she volunteered there for 45 years. In the process she developed a way to assess fossilized trilobites that was so useful to the field that she was made a member of the Paleontology Society of America and given an honorary doctorate by the University of Tübingen in Germany. Her work can best be seen in the book Die Trilobiten des Oberdevons Beiträge zur Kenntnis devonischer Trilobiten that she coauthored with her husband, who was more formally trained paleontologist. Her main contribution to the book was over 500 halftone images of trilobites.
Some women are famous because they’re the first to do something. Some because they do something better than anyone else. Barbara Newhall Follett is famous because she started early. She was born on March 4, 1914, and published her first novel, The House Without Windows, in 1927. She was 12 years old, and the book became a bestseller. She followed that up with another novel, The Voyage of the Norman D, when she had reached the ripe old age of 14. Her second novel was also successful.
During the start of the Great Depression, Follett worked as a secretary in New York while continuing to write. She married in 1934, but the marriage did not go well. She was evidently unhappy with her husband, and in 1939 she walked out of their apartment — and was never seen again. Nobody knows what happened to her. But you can still read her books.
Alice Rivlin wasn’t a writer; her expertise was in economics and finance. And it was pretty formidable expertise, too. She was born March 4, 1931, and grew up to direct the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, among other things. She originally thought she would study history, but took an economics course at Indiana University and found her calling. She graduated college in 1952 and moved to Europe to work on the Marshall Plan. After that she wanted to enroll in graduate school in public administration, but her application was rejected. Not on the grounds that she wasn’t qualified. They wouldn’t let her in because “she was a woman of marriageable age.” So she simply enrolled in Radcliffe and earned a Ph.D. in economics. You can still read her books, too. They might not be as entertaining as Barbara Follett’s novels, though. They have titles like Systematic Thinking for Social Action and Reviving the American Dream: The Economy, the States, and the Federal Government.
One thing you discover when you look into the women of history is that there are a lot of them. This is just one day out of the entire Women’s History Month, and there are more accomplished women than I can manage to include. So go have a look for yourself. Check out Fannie Barrier Williams, who passed away on March 4, 1944. She was an African American teacher, activist for women’s rights, and the first black woman to be a member of the Chicago Women’s Club. Or read about Penny Mourdaunt or Claire Baker. Both were born on March 4, and were elected to the British and Scottish Parliaments. Just think how many more women there are in the rest of the days of Women’s History Month.
