Women in the 20th Century (Part II)

I posted earlier about the changing role of women in the workforce and Eleanor Roosevelt. I’m really enjoying writing about influential women, so I’m going to keep going in this post with Jeanette Rankin and Rosalind Franklin.

Jeanette Rankin

We talked about Jeanette Rankin in class briefly- for those of you who don’t remember she was the first woman elected to Congress, which is a pretty impressive achievement. It seems kind of weird that most of us wouldn’t have heard of her until USHAP, but she was actually pretty cool.

What’s interesting is that she actually started serving her first term in Congress three years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), in 1917. She had already helped women in her home state of Montana to gain the vote in 1914, and so funnily enough women could be elected to Congress before most could even vote. I’m guessing it goes without saying that she was actively involved in the suffrage movement and probably the Congress member most eager to see the Nineteenth Amendment passed.

Rankin was a Progressive, which made sense, as it was the Progressives who pushed for women’s suffrage. She was concerned with social issues, and very much a pacifist. She’s famous for being the only Congress member to vote against entering both World Wars. Her aversion to war led to a lot of talk about her being a tool of the Germans and not understanding the importance of war and that sort of thing. So I guess another claim to fame might be that she was responsible for the first female politician bashing on a national level. She probably didn’t realize it, but she was starting a tradition.

Instead of the wars, Rankin focused on social issues at home. She supported protest strikes by miners and worked towards passage of legislation banning child labor, as well as a variety of other peace initiatives and social reform movements.

At the age of 88 her pacifistic sentiments were still strong, and she led a peace protest against the Vietnam War consisting of 5000 people. She was still involved in protesting the war when she died five years later in 1973.

Barbara McClintock

So far I’ve focused on women in politics, but I’d like to focus on a woman who made some impressive advancements in science. Most of us can at least vaguely trace the increase of female involvement in politics, but at least for me there is a giant gap between the times when educated women were restricted to fields in the humanities (not that the humanities aren’t cool) to more modern times when there are women in just about every scientific profession, even if they still are a bit underrepresented.

So, Barbara McClintock. She was responsible for finding the first proof of the existence of crossover genes. There had been some speculation on their existence before, but it wasn’t until Mc Clintock’s work that it was clear that they really existed.

In addition she discovered transposable elements through her extensive experimentation with maize. She was made fun of at the time, but approximately thirty years later she won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine. She remains the only woman to have won this award to this day, so it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.

You can probably tell I don’t have much of an idea of the science I’m talking about here since it’s been a couple of years since I took bio and I only remember that I used to know what these terms meant, not what they actually mean. If you want to understand more of what McClintock did you can check out this link: http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/barbara-mcclintock-and-the-discovery-of-jumping-34083

And this for more on Rankin: http://history.house.gov/People/Listing/R/RANKIN,-Jeannette-(R000055)/