Why March 4 is a Great Day for Women in Politics

5 minute read

On the same date, March 4, many years apart, two women made history in American politics. In 1917, Jeannette Rankin took office as a representative of Montana, the first woman ever in Congress. The first female member of a president’s cabinet, Frances Perkins, took her post on Mar. 4, 1933. Both were pioneers, carving out their roles as they went along. But their accomplishments extended beyond just showing up as the first women in what had previously been male political spheres. Rankin took an influential stand for women’s suffrage and pacifism, and Perkins’ ideas laid the groundwork for the New Deal and social security.

“They both had to invent the roles for themselves in public life,” says Kirstin Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal, a biography of Perkins. “And they had to do it by being strong and independent-minded.”

The two women were born the same year, 1880 (although Perkins, who notoriously lied about her age, always claimed 1882). Rankin was raised in Montana by a rancher and a schoolteacher. After working for years in the woman’s suffrage movement, in 1914 she succeeded in winning women the right to vote in her state. Two years later she was running for one of two of the state’s at-large Congressional seats, which she secured by 6,000 votes with the help of Montana’s newly enfranchised women.

Pacifism played a major role in the women’s suffrage movement, and Rankin was one of its staunchest champions. She took office amid intense debate over whether or not the U.S. should enter World War I. In the final vote, she was one of 50 dissenters, a decision that generated controversy in the media and among her fellow suffragists. Among the citizens of Montana, her move wasn’t as unpopular, but new state legislation changed the rules about Congressional elections, placing the Republican Rankin in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Rankin decided to gamble on a Senate race in 1918, which she lost.

See Hillary Clinton's Evolution in 20 Photos

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Teenager: Hillary Rodham poses in her 1965 senior class portrait from Park Ridge East High School in Illinois. AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Law School Student: Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham pose for a snapshot at Yale Law School in 1972. They married in 1975.Clinton Presidential Library
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Mother: Clinton poses with her husband, Bill, then in his first term as governor, with their week-old daughter, Chelsea, on March 5, 1980.Donald R. Broyles—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Campaign Companion: Clinton celebrates her husband's victory in a Democratic runoff in Little Rock, Ark. on June 8, 1982.AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Arkansas First Lady: Clinton is seen in her inaugural ball gown in 1985. A. Lynn—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Political Wife: Clinton celebrates her husband's inauguration in Little Rock on Sept. 20, 1991.Danny Johnston—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Dignitary: Clinton receives an honorary law degree from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., on May 30, 1992.Chris Ocken—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Campaigner: Clinton speaks at a meeting during the presidential campaign for her husband in Buffalo, N.Y., on April 4, 1992.Bill Sikes—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
First Lady: Clinton appears at the MTV Inauguration Ball at the Washington Convention Center on Jan. 20, 1993. Shayna Brennan—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Second-Term First Lady: Clinton attends the Inaugural Ball after her husband was sworn in to a second term on Jan. 20, 1997. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
Hillary Rodham Clinton
New York Senator: Clinton speaks at a press conference with female Democratic senators in Washington on June 21, 2006. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Committee Member: Clinton listens to the testimony of Lt. General David Petraeus to the Senate Armed Forces Committee at a hearing on Capital Hill in Washington on Jan. 23, 2007. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Candidate: Clinton holds a a campaign event in Portsmouth, N.H., while running for the Democratic presidential nomination on Sept. 2, 2007. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Campaigner: Clinton speaks at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Jan. 2, 2008. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
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Secretary of State: Clinton kisses President Obama at a joint session of Congress in Washington on Feb. 24, 2009. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
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Witness: Clinton joins Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Dec. 3, 2009. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Witness: Clinton testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Jan. 23, 2013.J. Scott Applewhite—AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Author: Clinton attends a signing memoir, "Hard Choices," at a Costco in Arlington, Va., on June 14, 2014. Brooks Kraft—Corbis
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Grandmother: Clinton holds her granddaughter Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City on Sept. 27, 2014.Office of President Clinton/AP
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Once and Future Candidate: Clinton speaks at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's annual Steak Fry in Indianola, Iowa, on Sept. 14, 2014. Brooks Kraft—Corbis

Although she wanted to be remembered as the congresswoman who voted for women’s suffrage nationwide, the 19th Amendment passed in 1919, when she was out of office. Instead, she immortalized her reputation as a pacifist when in 1940 she was elected to a House seat a second time. After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, she stood firm as the only vote against the United States entering World War II. Responding to nearly universal pleas to change her vote to a “yes,” or at least to abstain, she responded, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” The ethical stand she took drew a major backlash, making it difficult to do much with the rest of her term and obliterating her chances at reelection.

Frances Perkins, for her part, got her political start in 1911 when she witnessed the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. She made a name for herself on work-safety commissions in the city, helping to conceive and draft many fire regulations that still exist today. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected the governor of New York, he appointed her as his industrial commissioner. According to Downey, she was one of his most trusted, lifelong advisers. Yet her appointment to Secretary of Labor was still uncertain after he won the presidency, as her gender made her a highly controversial choice. When Roosevelt offered her the job, Downey says, she accepted with conditions—that he let her pursue policy goals that would eventually make up the New Deal.

“She’s really the creator of social security. She’s the driving force behind the Federal Labor Standards Act. It lead to the 40-hour work week. It banned child labor,” Downey tells TIME. “And it changed America.”

To be taken seriously, Perkins dressed very modestly, rarely wearing any makeup. She noted that men tended to take more seriously women who reminded them of their mothers—one of many observations she recorded in a journal she’d been keeping throughout her professional career titled, “Notes on the Male Mind.” She was quiet in meetings, lest she interrupt and be shouted down, or worse, bruise the ego of the man she sought to contradict. She later wrote:

“I tried to have as much of a mask as possible. I wanted to give the impression of being a quiet, orderly woman who didn’t buzz-buzz all the time. … I knew that a lady interposing an idea into men’s conversation is very unwelcome. I just proceeded on the theory that this was a gentleman’s conversation on the porch of a golf club perhaps. You didn’t butt in with bright ideas.”

Rankin and Perkins confronted odds that exceeded under-representation, from repressive stereotyping to an absence of bathroom facilities. When Rankin first took office, American women were three years away from having the vote guaranteed. Perkins herself was unable to vote for much of her early political career, until New York state voted for suffrage in 1917.

“There was a lot of stigma attached to them. There was an unsavory association to unattended women,” Downey says. “Back then there was a saying about women, ‘You only want to be in the newspaper twice—when you’re married and when you die.'”

Perkins hoped her unquestionable success would earn her a comfortable professorship after her retirement from public life. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. She had trouble securing offers, moving universities often when she wasn’t granted tenure. Eventually, she ended up at Cornell, where she stayed until her death in 1965.

Meanwhile, though Rankin never again took public office, she used her notoriety as a pacifist to continue lobbying against war. She led a peace march in the Washington in 1968 to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and when she died at age 91 in 1972, she was considering yet another run for Congress.

See Ruth Bader Ginsburg Grow from Toddler to Supreme Court Justice

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
August 2, 1935 Childhood photograph of Ruth Bader taken when she was two years old.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
1948 Ruth Bader delivers a sermon as camp Rabbi at the age of 15, at Che-Na-Wah camp in Minerva, N.Y.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
December, 1953 Studio photograph of Ruth Bader, taken in Dec. 1953 when she was a Senior at Cornell University.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
Fall, 1954 Martin D. Ginsburg and Ruth Bader Ginsburg taken in the fall while Martin Ginsburg served in the Army, before being drafted, stationed at Artillery Village in Fort Sill, Okla. Martin Ginsburg was drafted into the Army in 1954.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
Summer 1958 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg play with their three-year old daughter, Jane, in her bedroom at Martin's parents' home in Rockville Centre, N.YCollection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
Fall 1980 Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her first term as a United States Circuit Judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
December, 1980 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her husband Martin Ginsburg, and their children James and Jane in a boat off the shore of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg with her husband at the Greenbrier, circa 1972
1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg with her husband Martin at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.V.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
Oct. 1, 1993 Informal portrait of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg standing before the mantle in the Justices' Dining Room in Washington.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
August 10, 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. From left to right stand President Bill Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Supreme Court Justice Young Photos
Official portrait of Justice Ruth Bader GinsburgSteve Petteway—Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

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