Current Events > As a kid, I was always a little disgusted by Jeannette Rankin.

(+) Yeah! (+)

First Female Rep in Congress, elected before women could even vote. She served two terms, non-consecutive, one during WWI and the other during WWII.

If you know about her, or even if you don't, you might have learned only one person voted against the US entering WWII, and that person was her. Knowing about the atrocities Germany and Japan were doing, and the fact this was right after the US was attacked in one of the only times in our entire history, it just made no sense to me.

I'm sure there was more to her reasoning, but I guess one strong piece, that many politicians should actually think about today, but no one will is, that since she was a woman, she, and other women couldn't even fight in the war. To vote yes is to basically send someone else purely to die for you. She understood that; Many politicians have not and will continue to not understand that.

It is unfair to paint her entire career with just this moment anyways; she was an activist before and after her time as a U.S. representative and was a big fighter for equal rights. I believe I read she was part of the prohibition movement, but I don't really blame any woman (or man for that matter) for being against alcohol at that time. Alcohol really is something that humanity would probably be better without; it's just a shame we couldn't learn that for ourselves.

Her biggest fault was believing humanity could be better. She was against alcohol because she realized all it did was mess with our greatest gift (and that was even before the onset of mass driving with drunk driving being such a problem), and she was against war because she thought we could use our minds to settle our differences in a more peaceful manner without bloodshed. Unfortunately, when you're dealing with people like Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, I don't think there would be a way to do that.