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Yesterday, we celebrated Women’s Equality Day and the 90th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in West Hollywood with Councilemember Lindsey Horvath, Councilmember Abbe Land, veteran activist Zoe Nicholson, Kamala Lopez of Las Lopezistas and Gloria Allred. We honored Allred’s 30 dayfast in recognition of the continued need for the unpassed ERA and officially kicked off ERA 2010 Launch! Fellow blogger and president of the SMC FMLA, Rachel O, vice-president of the SMC FMLA and I represented Santa Monica College’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, a chapter of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s efforts to bring feminist issues across college campuses.
Jeannette Rankin and Kamala Lopez are inspirational role models for all of us. Please read the full article at Women’s Media Center.
Left: Kamala Lopez discussing her film at WAM! LA On Thursday, March 25, 2010 at Santa Monica College Right: Presenter Carla Ohrendorff and Kamala Lopez at WAM! LA Thursday, March 25, 2010.
If you don’t know why she is important or have never heard her name, it’s time you know her and know you should.
In our quest to bring you new role models and sheroes, we bring you an excerpt from Kamala Lopez‘s post from September 2008 at the Huffington Post. Sarah Palin’s annoying and repetitive cries of “maverick” prompted Lopez to write a piece on true historical maverick, Jeannette Rankin, the subject of A Single Woman.
On a cold distant November in 1916, a true Republican maverick and reformer became the first woman elected to the United States Congress. Her name was Jeannette Rankin and as an indefatigable champion of peace, justice and equality for all, her ghost stands in stark contrast to the Republican woman being hailed today as a loveable patriot and agent of change.
Should Sarah Palin be voted into office come this November, ninety two years after Jeannette’s historic election, she may well be responsible for change: a change back to a time before the struggles of thousands of women and men succeeded in providing a framework upon which the Women’s, Peace and Civil Rights movements could weave themselves into the fabric of America.
When Jeannette Rankin ran for Congress from Montana, not only were there no women in the US government – women across the United States couldn’t vote. Three years later the nineteenth amendment was ratified granting all American women the Federal right to cast their ballot. Today more than fifty million American women are not registered. Of registered female voters in the last election, twenty two million of us didn’t bother.
It is the most painful irony to watch Palin stand on Jeannette’s shoulders in order to dismantle that which Rankin gave her life to build. At the time that Jeannette was campaigning, there were several states in which it was still legal for a husband to terminate his wife’s pregnancy without her consent. Choice and abortion are not synonyms. Choice is a word with connotations that reach far and deep into a woman’s life – her finances, her sexuality, her body, her opportunities, her control over her own destiny. Rankin believed that these choices should be available not only to all women, but to all peoples.
