Unstoppable Women

Jeannette Rankin went home to Missoula in the summer of 1909, not having any other place to go in particular. 

Thirty years old without a husband, children, or vocation to speak of, she wasn't what society - or she - would have considered a success. Still, she would not be rushed. She would find her passion and purpose in her own time. Besides, Jeannette had one thing that no one could take away from her: An education. A lot of education. 

She learned to read and write in the two-room schools of frontier Montana that grew up alongside her. By the time she got to high school, her hometown had become a city, and her class size ballooned to a dozen or more. After graduating, she went to Montana State University, built partially on land her family had donated. Later on, she received her Master's degree in Social Work from the New York School of Philanthropy. 

She had tried her hand at this pursuit, gaining employment at a home for orphaned children as a caseworker outside of Seattle. But the conditions were deplorable, and the hope for change impossible. She could not stand to be so useless when so much needed doing. It was only she had to figure out how to do it - a question she aimed to answer back in Missoula. 

Her sisters and brother welcomed her home, all on break from their various universities. Talk around the dinner table rang with ideas and debate as the Rankin children shared all they were learning and how they intended to make their mark on the world with this new knowledge. But even in this heady and familial environment, Jeannette reserved her most radical ideas for after the rest of her family had gone to bed when she and her brother Wellington, getting his law degree at Harvard, argued and talked and confided in each other well into the night beneath the stars of Big Sky Country. 

Between jobs in Seattle, she had volunteered for the Women's Suffrage Campaign, which, she told Wellington, lit her up like nothing had before. 

Then why, Wellington asked her, didn't she make a career out of it? 

Why not, indeed? 

That fall, Jeannette returned to Washington, where she became integral to the successful campaign to grant women the right to vote. From there, she moved on to California's suffrage campaign, where she played no less critical of a role, especially when securing the support of men working in logging camps and mines who were so much like those she grew up around in rural Missoula. Finally, she came home again, but this time with clear direction. First, to enshrine the women's vote in the Montana State Constitution and second, to get herself elected as America's first Congresswoman. 

She did both of these things faster than anyone thought possible. But she would not have been able to do either without first her education and second her own timeline of success. 

Jeannette spent much of her young adult life taking care of her younger siblings. It was only at 30, right when society began to deem a woman as "past her prime," that Jeannette had the time and resources to pursue her passion and purpose in life. Once she did, she could not - and would not - be stopped. 

Among the many facets of Jeannette’s legacy, this is one of the most enduring, thanks to The Jeannette Rankin Foundation, a scholarship fund that provides unrestricted Scholar Grants to students who identify as women, nonbinary, or Two-Spirit who are 35 and older and demonstrate financial need.

Started in 1976 by Jeannette’s personal assistant, Reita Rivers, and friends Sue Bailey, Gail Dendy, Margaret Holt, and Heather Kleiner with her bequest of a $16,000, the Jeannette Rankin Foundation has awarded more than $5 million in scholarships to date, positively impacting the educational goals of nearly 2,000 women.

Like Jeannette herself, many Jeannette Rankin Foundation recipients are caretakers of siblings, children, and parents who could not pursue their own educational and professional goals until later in life. Almost 70% of scholars are single mothers and more than 50% are the first in their family to go to college. Many of them made less than a poverty wage when they begin. Yet amazingly, and thanks to the Foundation’s innovative unrestricted grants and robust support programs, Jeannette Rankin Scholars have a persistence rate of almost 90%.

Most importantly, like Jeannette, once they get started, the Foundation's Scholars become unstoppable. While many of them didn’t have so much as a high school degree when they began their educational journey, scholarship recipients have become successful doctors and teachers, elected officials and accountants, nurses and engineers, and so much more. Together, Jeannette Rankin Foundation scholars have had an estimated economic impact of $520,000,000 in their communities and in our country.

But most importantly, they have transformed their own lives and those of their family, leaving as their legacy a wealth of education, the courage to dream, and the fortitude to turn hope into action.

This week on The Female Body Politic Podcast, I was honored to talk with Jeannette Rankin Foundation CEO Karen Sterk about how they are transforming women's lives through education while helping to create a more just and equitable future for all.