WINNING THE EARTHQUAKE How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress, recovering the life of a great American

WINNING THE EARTHQUAKE How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress
LORISSA RINEHART
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first major biography of Jeannette Rankin, a groundbreaking suffragist, activist, and the first American woman to hold federal office.

“Few members of Congress have ever stood more alone while being true to a higher honor and loyalty.” —President John F. Kennedy on Jeannette Rankin

Born on a Montana ranch in 1880, Jeannette Rankin knew how to drive a tractor, ride a horse, make a fire, and read the sky for weather. But most of all, she knew how to talk to people, how to convince them of her vision for America. It was this rare skill that led her, in 1916, to become the first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives.

As her first act, Rankin introduced the legislation that would become the 19th Amendment. Throughout her two terms in 1916 and 1940, she continued to introduce and pass legislation benefitting unions, protecting workers, and increasing aid for children in poverty. In 1941, she stood tall as the sole anti-war voice in Congress during WWII, advocating for pacifism in the face of tragedy and stating that you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

A suffragist, feminist, peace activist, workers' rights advocate, progressive, and Republican, Rankin remained ever true to her beliefs—no matter the price she had to pay personally. Yet, despite the momentous steps she made for women in politics, overcoming the boys club of capitalists and career politicians who never wanted to see a woman in Congress, Jeannette Rankin’s story has been largely forgotten. In Winning the Earthquake, Lorissa Rinehart deftly uncovers the compelling history behind this singular American hero, bringing her story back to life

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was aware of Rankin as the lone voice against declaring war in 1941. My 1970s public school education in Austin taught me that fact in seventh grade; nothing positive was ever added to it in any class I ever took on History, on sociology, or any other discipline at any later stage of my education. This book, published fifty years after that initial mention of Rankin's name, is the first comprehensive biography of a very very important voice in US politics in the first half of the twentieth century. This proves a point Author Rinehart makes:

"Nowhere in her education or prolific reading had she learned that in 1848, three hundred women gathered in Seneca Falls to declare their sovereign right to the ballot. Nor had she heard that since then, women in every state of the nation had been fighting for their right to vote. To her even greater amazement, they had won it in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, all before the turn of the twentieth century. She and all American women seemed to have been purposefully denied knowledge of their own struggle for liberation."

My one cavil with this statement is the modifying presence of "seemed" since there is no better way to stop people from making change than to stop them from knowing about the changes that have already happened. If authoritarians do not want any changes either made again or expanded on, they simply erase the history that shows their way is not the only way from public discourse. Then the few places the awareness of the changes survives can be marginalized and shouted down.

Book banning is step one; book burning step two; reducing literacy overall is the final nail in the coffin the high-control society uses.

I was drawn in by the title of the book. It seemed so off-kilter, so self-evidently contradictory, that I wanted to know where it came from hence my desire to read a book about someone I knew nothing substantive about. It's from one of pacifist Rankin's well-known in her time sayings: "you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Millennia of corroborative evidence has had no appreciable effect on war's prevalence.

I was impressed by the depth of Author Rinehart's scholarship. Her extensive notes and citations were all very enlightening and well-chosen from my layman's point of view. There are widely varying sources cited so this tells me how very much work it was to find all the factual crumbs she did. One major shock, though honestly it shouldn't've been, was that the representative from Montana was elected as a Republican. I'm so steeped in the post-LBJ empire of evil that is the modern GOP that I've lost sight of the entire progressive history of the Republicans. Go read about Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt. Time was these were the progressive leaders, not the soulless evil bastards in the McConnell/Bush/Cheney ilk or the wild-eyed reactionary MAGAts.

How likely is the present base, let alone "leadership", of the party to embrace a pacifist follower of Gandhi, a campaigner for the abolition of the Electoral College, and vehement supporter of unions? Growing up in Montana in the 1880s (when their representatives were called "the gentlemen from Anaconda," the state's largest employer and main economic driver), Rankin recognized the evils of untrammeled capitalism. She emulated Jane Addams in her work for the betterment of ordinary folks. Rankin was, in short, the best kind of radical there is, a radical believer in people and their power to do good...when left to do it.

A role model for today who is finally getting her scholarly due, I hope the sudden awareness of Gen Z that things in the US do not have to be this way will lead some of them to discover this spirit-parent from our country's past.