Jeannette and Muriel: refusing to give in to war

This year, 2016, is the 100th anniversary of the election of the first woman to the US Congress. Jeannette Rankin, whose father was Scottish-Canadian, was elected in 1916 to one of the at-large seats in Montana. Shortly after her term began, there was a vote on whether the US should enter the First World War. She was one of 50 who voted against it but she took the greatest criticism around the country.

Her seat disappeared in a redistribution and she was unsuccessful in a run for the Senate but in 1940, she ran again and won. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was a vote on whether the country should declare war on Japan and once again, she voted against war. This time, she was the only dissenter. Her colleagues asked her to change her vote, to make it unanimous, or at least to abstain. She refused.

"As a woman I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."

She was vilified for this vote. She was hissed from the gallery and pursued by reporters into a cloakroom where she had to take refuge in a phone booth until police could rescue her.

While her action was widely ridiculed in the press, William Allen White, writing in the Kansas Emporia Gazette, acknowledged her courage in taking it:

Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. The Gazette entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position. But Lord, it was a brave thing! And its bravery someway discounted its folly. When, in a hundred years from now, courage, sheer courage based upon moral indignation is celebrated in this country, the name of Jeannette Rankin, who stood firm in folly for her faith, will be written in monumental bronze, not for what she did, but for the way she did it.

Two days later, there was a vote on whether to declare war on Germany and Italy and she voted against that one too. By that time, she was very unpopular and she decided to retire from the House.

I first saw her in Washington DC on a visit to the United States Capitol's Statuary Hall. The inscription on this statue says, "I cannot vote for war."

I knew little about her then but I've since read a lot about her and have come to admire her greatly. Besides her terms in Congress, she spent many years working on pacifist, feminist and civil rights causes – including getting the vote for women. In fact, [a]lthough her legacy rests almost entirely on her pacifism, Rankin told the Montana Constitutional Convention in 1972 that she would have preferred otherwise. "If I am remembered for no other act," she said, "I want to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote."

Years after her political action when she was asked if she ever regretted her votes against entering the wars, she said, "Never. If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute."

It was that quote that made me think of my dear friend, Muriel Duckworth, who passed away in 2009. Muriel was famous for her well-known saying, "War is stupid." She was a pacifist, no matter what. She said,

I don’t think people recognize that war is the greatest destroyer of human life, the greatest polluter, the greatest creator of refugees, the greatest cause of starvation and illness.

I've just posted a piece about Muriel that was first published in The Women's Almanac in 1993. It's called Muriel, in her own words and I invite you to drop over and have a look.

And I have a postscipt: back in the 1980s when we still had and were members of the Red Herring bookstore, our main kitchen calendar every year was the Peace Calendar. We got it at Red Herring! When the bookstore was gone, we lost track and we began to use other and varied calendars. For awhile, we used the lovely CBC calendar which featured local artists' work.

This year, Dan looked around and found the source of the Peace Calendar, sent away for it and once again, it's in the calendar place of honour in our kitchen. It's got the kind of daily references that other calendars don't have, it's got lots of space for writing in appointments, and its monthly picture is always something of interest.

This month? March 2016? Why, it's Jeannette Rankin. I can't tell you how pleased I was to see her again.

Peace be with you

The Women in Black (London) hold a vigil every Wednesday from 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. around the statue of Edith Cavell, just near St Martin's church and Trafalgar Square. They've rarely missed a Wednesday since 2003. It was Wednesday when we happened to be walking in that neighbourhood on our recent trip to London and we saw the women there.

Women in Black is a world-wide network of women committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and other forms of violence.

When I saw the Women in London that day, I remembered the times I stood with the Women in Black in Halifax, in front of the Old Halifax Library. The vigils were silent. We simply stood there, holding placards, handing out the material we'd brought along.

The one I remember most clearly was as the First Gulf War was beginning in 1990.

Early on the morning of January 17, 1991, a massive U.S.-led air offensive hit Iraq’s air defenses, moving swiftly on to its communications networks, weapons plants, oil refineries and more. The coalition effort, known as Operation Desert Storm, benefited from the latest military technology, including Stealth bombers, Cruise missiles, so-called “Smart” bombs with laser-guidance systems and infrared night-bombing equipment. The Iraqi air force was either destroyed early on or opted out of combat under the relentless attack, the objective of which was to win the war in the air and minimize combat on the ground as much as possible.

It's always difficult to be a pacifist in Halifax but particularly so when a new war is getting underway. We were called some very unpleasant names as we stood quietly.

I went into my archives to see what I might have written at that time about fighting for peace in a time of war. I was a columnist with The Daily News and this, in part, was one thing I wrote around that time:

I find it disheartening that the people who are anti-war, the people who work actively for peace have been put into a position where they feel almost apologetic about their opinion.

In order to avoid complete alienation from neighbours and acquaintances, some people who are for peace feel they must preface their every anti-war statement with something about supporting the troops: "I'm against the war but I support our troops, I'm proud of our boys and girls serving their country."

The other obligatory remark for people who speak against the war is a denunciation of Saddam. You have to acknowledge that you know how bad he is ("Many things are true even if George Bush says them," writes author Todd Gitlin in The Village Voice.) So you have to say, "I agree Saddam is a monster but..."

The question we should be asking ourselves is: how have we come to this? Where has this upside-down world come from, where values are so screwed up that it has become impossible to say you're against the war simply because you believe war is wrong.

Why has the use of war to settle international conflicts become the norm and people who oppose war have become The Other – marginalized by society?

Peace activists are harassed on the streets and called "traitor." Anti-war demonstrations are ignored or played down by the media. The people who march are portrayed as pie-in-the-sky dreamers or old hippies. Censorship is accepted with nary a whimper of protest. News reporters who normally talk about "objectivity" as if it were a sacrament, suddenly pepper their reports with "we" and "they."

All this because, all facts aside, at some deep and primal level, war is seen to be noble. It's usually mentioned in the same breath with democracy, freedom and God. To be against it then, is to be against democracy, freedom and God.

So you can be in favour of the war – just because. But if you're against the war, you'd better be prepared to qualify it, justify it, and apologize for it. Even still, you'll be a pariah.