Massachusetts Matters: A different look at the 2019 Women's March

Introduction

I attended the event, but I was part of the counter-protest organized by Resist Marxism. There were groups, including Antifa, which protested us, by chanting false and hate-filled accusations of extremist behavior. I recorded five videos that day, which are all on this page. Four of these five videos were recorded at the Boston Common. The fifth video was recorded about half an hour after the women had begun their march.

The poster on the right, found on this August 17, 2018 web page, is a typical display of blatant lies that is used to encourage violence against a peaceful counter-protest. I'm quoting the poster.

"Just days after the murder of Heather Hayer by a white supremacist in Charlotesville, these organizers invited neo-nazis and far-right groups to rally in Boston ...

But thousands of ordinary Bostonians took to the streets and shut the fascists down.

Let's shut them down again!"

Peaceful activism vs. inciting violence

They're very different. One is peaceful. The other one isn't. One is protected speech under the terms of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The other one is a violation of U.S. laws, and as such, is punishable by the Justice Department after a conviction in a court.

"Shut them down again"

This language is similar to what I saw online after the confrontation between Michael Brown and Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri police department after Mike robbed a convenience store in that city and assaulted the store clerk.

Shut it down (again)

(I refuse to discuss the issue with anyone. My unnamed organization demands that a specific action must be taken, and my organization is threatening to stop all economic and social activity in a whole city unless we get our way.)

This fits most people's definition of the threat of terrorism.

I wrote about the riot in Ferguson on this October 2014 blog page, which includes the "shut it down" poster on the right, but I delayed writing the page for a month because I hoped that the deliberate attempt to overstimulate the city, state, and country into a violent reaction would end soon. It didn't, so I had to write the page.

My October 2014 page, published on my main blog, includes videos of looting and other forms of street violence, which were incited by the well-publicized statements of President Obama, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and others. The looting and property destruction has caused long-term economic damage to the city of Ferguson, Missouri. My page also includes photos, like the one below, of people who are prepared to defend their homes and businesses with their guns, which is the natural reaction to the looting.

Violence causes more violence

In the eyes of the people who want violence, the answer to incidents like the confrontation in Ferguson is a vigilante group like the one in the first photo below, but take a close look at the man on the right, facing the camera.

The pair of photos below was copied from this August 16, 2012 article in Business Insider. This man calls himself "King Samir Shabazz".

In January 2012, the same man encouraged the people in this room to commit large-scale acts of violence against people just because they looked different than he did.

He committed a hate crime on this day.

He has been arrested for weapons charges but never for a hate crime.

Here are links to articles on the Philly.com website dated June 26, 2013 and July 1, 2014.

In January 2012, the U.S. Attorney General was Eric Holder.

An inadequate response to a documented 2012 threat

Eric Holder is shown below in a photo copied from this undated page on the website of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, located at Arizona State University. The page announces that he is a scheduled speaker at an event that this group is hosting. At the time that the man in the above video made his speech to a friendly crowd, Eric was the U.S. Attorney General, appointed to that job by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, which was controlled by the Democrat Party in 2012..

The reason why Eric Holder never ordered the F.B.I. to arrest the man in the video above for a hate crime is because Eric was not professional enough to set aside his personal feelings about race and do his job, even though he was the U.S. Attorney General and thus, in full command of the F.B.I.

This is the F.B.I.'s definition of a hate crime, copied from their website. The U.S. Justice Department, which Eric Holder was in charge of, supervises the F.B.I.

A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.

“A criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”

The man who is speaking in the video above clearly and undeniably has a bias against other people on the basis of race, and he is clearly and undeniably conspiring with the other people in the room to commit murder. He has therefore committed a hate crime, as defined by the F.B.I. - the conspiracy to commit murder against people who belong to a different race (using his own definition of the term), but "King Samir Shabazz", pictured in the center and on the right, has never been arrested for this hate crime by any of the Attorneys General, including Eric Holder, pictured on the left.

He likes King Samir Shabazz.

He likes violence, so ...

... so he commits violence with the approval of the U.S. Attorney General.

These are the first five paragraphs of the August 24, 2012 page of the website of the Anti-Defamation League. The links in these paragraphs were on their page.

In an August 13 New Black Panther Party online radio broadcast, the group’s National Field Marshal from Philadelphia King Samir Shabazz, went off on an vicious tirade about bombing white churches and killing white babies.

If Blacks want to be free, Shabazz explained, “you’re going to have to kill some of these babies, just born three seconds ago. You’re going to have to go into the God damn nursery and just throw a damn bomb in the damn nursery and just kill everything white in sight that ain’t right.”

Later in his rant, Shabazz describes how white churches are also a legitimate target: “We gonna need preachers going into the cracker churches throwing hand grenades on early Sunday morning when the cracker got his hands up, ‘please white Jesus!’ Well we gonna throw a bomb in that God damn church, burn up the cracker, burn up the cracker Jesus, and burn up some cracker white supremacy.”

In typical Shabazz fashion, he also described in detail how he would like to go into New Jersey and Pennsylvania suburbs to “drag some of these god damn rusty dusty ass crackers out of their homes, skin their asses alive, hang their asses up by some damn rope in some trees, drag them up and down the streets by God damn trucks, sick the pit bulls on them, pour acid on their asses, dump them in a God damn river, bring them back up, bust them in the head with a rock.”

Shabazz also discussed the need for AK-47s, M16s, grenade launchers, and other weapons for a NBPP military.

If the Anti-Defamation League can listen to a recording of this man's radio broadcast, then the F.B.I. can also listen to it, but there's one important difference between the two organizations.

The F.B.I. can make an official investigation of the threat, and if they see a violation of U.S. law, they can send evidence of the crime to a U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Justice Department, who can prosecute people who violate U.S. law.

If these defendants are convicted, and if the judge in their case decides that the defendant should be imprisoned, then the Justice Department will transport that person to the appropriate prison for the duration of his sentence.

False accusations against conservatives

This is the first paragraph of this undated page on the website of the Anti-Defamation League.

In just one year, the alt right has gone from relative obscurity to being one of the United States' most visible extremist movements. This stratospheric rise is due in large part to the rhetoric employed during the 2016 presidential campaign, which granted implicit approval to the once-taboo hallmarks of the far right – overt racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, misogyny, and anti-Muslim bigotry.

According to them, the 2016 presidential campaign "granted implicit approval to the once-taboo hallmarks of the far right – overt racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, misogyny, and anti-Muslim bigotry."

This is another section on the same page, titled "What is the Alt Right?". The link in this paragraph was on their page.

The alt right (short for “alternative right”) is a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicit or explicit racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideology. Many seek to re-inject such bigoted ideas into the conservative movement in the United States. The alt right skews younger than other far right groups, and is very active online, using racist memes and message forums on 4chan, 8chan and certain corners of Reddit.

The Anti-Defamation League has defamed us, the people who were in our group, and the Resist Marxism organization that helped to organize the counter-protest. None of us fit their definition of "the Alt-Right" because none of us said, at any time that afternoon, that any one race of people was superior to any other race.

In fact, I personally don't even believe in the concept of race because, as you can see from the first photo, all of the world's people have skin that is a shade of brown. No one has white skin and no one has black skin, so it is simply inaccurate to call anyone white or black.

These people are all shades of brown.

No one is white and no one is black.

More information about my view of the mythical concept of race can be found in these blog pages. They are arranged in chronological order, oldest first.

The End of Racism, published in June 2012
If you see Racism, Speak Up, published in April 2013
The Beginning of Color-Blindness, published in June 2014
Race for Dummies, published in March 2015
Racism at Harvard University, published in May 2017

The page about racism at Harvard University was followed by a page on this blog that tried to organize a protest during the racist one-race graduation ceremony. I was the only person who protested the May 2017 ceremony, but I did it because I was supporting the principle of a color-blind world.

Harvard held another one-race graduation ceremony in May 2018, and I was there in person to protest that racist ceremony, too.

If Harvard University holds another one-race graduation ceremony in May 2019, I will return to protest it during the ceremony.

I was there at the Women's March

The one that was held at the Boston Common Saturday, January 19, 2019.

Unfortunately, potentially violent people were also there

The photo below, copied from a set of photos on a Wicked Local website, shows some of the Antifa members who were on the Boston Common that day.

The man who narrates the following almost-eight-minute video is an amateur investigative reporter.

He went undercover as a member of Antifa. He witnessed some violent crimes, which he and a friend with a video camera documented until the Antifa thugs started questioning him.

This is a risk that every investigative reporter has to assume in order to get a good story.

Our group had assembled at another location a few blocks away. I traveled with a friend to the staging area. My friend had an American flag in his knapsack, which I carried and displayed proudly from the staging area to the Common. About half of the other members of our group walked behind me.

When we got close to the Common, a large group of Antifa members tried to block our group from entering the Common. I personally tried and failed to enter the Common at one gate close to the Statehouse, but I and my group were able to enter the Common at another gate further west on Beacon Street. Antifa doesn't fight fascism, it promotes fascism by trying to control the lives of other people.

We had as much right to be on the ground at America's oldest public park as anyone else. A peaceful protest is what the women were doing that day, and it's also what we were doing that day. As you can see from the photos below, if any of us had broken the law, uniformed officers of the Boston police department were right there, capable of making arrests.

After we entered the Common, a group of uniformed Boston police officers, heavily protected and riding bicycles, raced towards us and separated us from the Antifa men who wanted to commit acts of violence on our group. Remember, none of us were wearing any Nazi uniforms or insignia. At no time during the day did I ever hear anyone praise Adolph Hitler or make any statement that expressed an extremist philosophy.

Mike is a fan of Antifa, but he recorded a video

This tweet, posted on January 19, 2019, includes a 6-minute, 35-second video of our entrance onto the Common long before any of the scheduled speakers were on the stage.

Live on the ground, disrupting the nazis disrupting the Boston womens march. https://t.co/HAhfvAMl8C
— Mike Gamms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (@mikegamms) January 19, 2019

Later in this page, you will see five videos I recorded that day. The first three show that some people were chanting slogans that accused us of being Nazis. Also later in this page, you will see another tweet from the same person. That tweet also includes a video, but this video was recorded later that same afternoon.

Documentation in many forms of our peaceful protest

These are the last two paragraphs of a January 19, 2019 WBUR news story.

A handful of counter-protesters chanted "U.S.A" and booed marchers.

By and large, the event was peaceful. There were no arrests, Boston police said. Many demonstrators left before the march ended due to the cold.

This story is not entirely accurate. It is true that no arrests were made on the Common, but one man was arrested half an hour later. The details are printed later on in this page.

These are the 5^th and 6^th paragraphs of a January 19, 2019 Mass Live news story.

A group of counter-protestors from the Club of American Nationalists also gathered in Boston.

Organizer John Camden said the group was there to support pro-life values and President Donald Trump.

The Mass Live article contains two inaccurate statements. Most of the organizing was done by Resist Marxism, not by the Club of American Nationalists.

Our group didn't have a goal of supporting President Trump. I'm sure that many of the individual members of our group voted for him in November 2016, but on that same day, I wrote-in Ted Cruz. This late May 2016 article explains the reasons why I had already decided, even then, to do that. His two Twitter accounts (@tedcruz and @SenTedCruz) have followed my Twitter account @BennyTheKite continuously since April 2013.

This is the 6^th paragraph of a January 19, 2019 Harvard Crimson article.

A group of counter-protesters including nationalists were also present at the march and carried signs reading “Build the Wall,” “Pro-Life,” and “Resist Marxism.” They were cordoned off from the crowd by a police presence.

These are the last two paragraphs of a January 19, 2019 Boston Herald news story.

A dozen conservative counterprotesters also gathered.

“I believe in pro-life women. We need to defend pro-life people, especially in this area where more religious people are getting called Nazis,” said Chris Bartley, 23, of Hyannis.

Killing people who abort babies is an extremist position, but being pro-life is not an extremist position.

My videos also document our peaceful protest

I recorded the following four videos on Saturday the 19^th from inside the small area that was separated from the rest of the crowd, including the potentially violent Antifa members I mentioned earlier, by two lines of police bicycles, each one with a uniformed Boston police department officer, wearing riot gear, close by.

The first three videos document the chanting that we heard almost constantly until some people on the bandstand began playing some music. You can hear this music in the fourth video.

A reporter's video of the same event

This section was added February 25, 2019.

This 8-minute video was made by an amateur reporter. There is footage about the large crowd of people who were there for the Women's March. This was recorded before my group entered. At 31 seconds, you can see a glimpse of a group of people wearing black clothes. They are the Antifa members, waiting for our group to arrive so they can begin a bloody fight.

There is also footage of some signs and flags that people carried.

Starting at 41 seconds into this 8-minute video, you will see, from the outside of the police protection line, the group that I was part of. Please notice that the police are standing still, not actively using any of their batons or service weapons. This is because our group was performing a peaceful protest by simply standing there near the bandstand where the speakers would later give their speeches.

What happened after the rally on the Common was over

After the women began marching west on Beacon Street, towards Kenmore Square, officers of the Boston Police Department asked the leaders of our group to stay on the Common. The Antifa people, who had been close to our group all afternoon, staring at us and chanting at us, stayed behind at the Common and were uncomfortably close to our group. When all the marchers had left, we were shepherded by the police onto Beacon Street, headed east, toward the Statehouse.

The movable human chain

Antifa tried to prevent us from leaving by making a line across Beacon Street, facing us. They linked arms with each other, but they were forced to walk backwards by the presence of uniformed Boston police officers, who walked their bicycles ahead of our group and directly in front of the Antifa thugs. This was recorded, starting at 2:55 in the 8-minute video above from the amateur reporter.

The Twitter account called Mike Gamms posted a tweet on January 20, 2019 that I copied and pasted onto this page earlier. This tweet, posted January 19th, includes a 6-minute, 51-second video of the same walk on Beacon Street.

Still Continuing to disrupt the nazis disrupting the Boston womens march. https://t.co/arlgzIgxIs
— Mike Gamms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (@mikegamms) January 19, 2019

This tweet, posted January 20th, includes a 1-minute, 47-second video of the same walk on Beacon Street.

🎶Chanting Nazis Out🎶 Antifascists form a human chain around crypto-fascists disrupting the Boston Women’s March as they are escorted through the streets of Boston by a kop line. #fashfreewomensmarch

Police aren’t here to protect us. We protect us. 🖤❤️✊🏾 pic.twitter.com/apTrQlr1Ew
— Red & Black Women's Self-Defense Front PVD (@MutualAidPVD) January 20, 2019

An Antifa member's video of the same event

This section was added February 27, 2019.

According to the Twitter account Mike Gamms, this 46-minute video was made by the Twitter account "Punks for Progress", but the most recent tweet that was posted on their account was made in November 2018.

The video begins with the walk east on Beacon Street.

33 seconds into the video, the man who recorded it makes a video selfie with the lower half of his face covered, but 8 seconds later, he pulls down the part of his mask that was covering his mouth.

The Boston-Common-related part of the video ends at 3 minutes, 41 seconds,

During the first "intermission", a man wearing a hat talks with someone he sees on a computer monitor. At 5:05, the man with the hat asks why our group didn't have a permit for a counter-protest. The answer is simple. The law doesn't require one. If it did, Antifa would need a permit for all of their counter-protests when someone else has obtained a permit for a rally.

At 6:20, the man on the screen says, "I was there because wherever Nazis are, we need to be." He never says that he needs a permit to be part of a counter-protest, yet his friend, one minute earlier, asked why we didn't have a permit.

The video resumes with the events on the Boston Common at 10 minutes, 11 seconds, but it shows an earlier event - our walk past the Boston Statehouse before we entered the Common. You can clearly hear the anger of the Antifa people who are chanting and calling us "Nazis".

At 11:41, one person in our group begins to cross Beacon Street, followed soon after by the rest of our group. I'm still carrying the American flag in my hands. It was not on a flagpole because the person who brought it had been told that a pole of any kind would be considered a possible weapon.

At approximately 12:15 in this video, I tried to enter the Common, but a group of Antifa people physically prevented me from entering. I was not hurt, and the American flag I carried was not damaged.

At 12:41, the recording of our failure to enter the Common at that gate ends.

At 14:34, the recording resumes after we have successfully entered the Common. We have already been protected by uniformed Boston Police Officers wearing riot gear. That part of the video ends at 18:29.

At 20 minutes, you can hear some Antifa people demanding that a reporter not give the Nazis "a platform" by interviewing someone in our group and by having someone make a video of the interview. In addition to the frequent lie that our group is composed of Nazis, this demand is strong evidence of their own authoritarian wishes, which were common among (wait for it) the Nazis.

At 37 minutes, the anger of the Antifa people towards the police is evident. My group is on the other side of the police. We are not chanting, taunting, or insulting anyone. Antifa decided a long time ago that they hated us and that they should misidentify us as "Nazis" to keep their hate alive.

Someone else recorded a video close to us while we walked

This section was added March 24, 2021.

The man who recorded the following 1 minute, 38 second video was a student at law school.

He was walking in the park, separated from us, the uniformed Boston Police Officers, and the violent Antifa members by an iron fence.

His short video only has a glimpse of the moving confrontation, but the audio portion of this vvideo has a clear recording of the chant.

"Whose streets?" "Our streets."

There was an obvious need for some dialog, but it wasn't the task of the police officers to facilitate the dialog. Their job was to protect my group from any physical attack. They did their job very well. We were not harmed that day.

Our point of view

We walked past the Statehouse and turned left onto Bowdoin Street. The diagram below shows our route.

Members of Antifa stayed as close to our group as the police would let them. I believed that if the police had not been there, Antifa would've started a very violent fight with us.

The police tried to block Antifa from entering Bowdoin Street, but they ran counter-clockwise around the building at the northeast corner of that intersection and were thus able to enter Bowdoin Street, ready to begin a fight.

I recorded this 5^th video on Bowdoin Street about half an hour after the first women had begun to walk east on Beacon Street. It has a description of what had taken place in the half-hour before I recorded it.

Some of us, myself included, were hoping that the police would arrest most or all of the potentially violent Antifa members and that the police wagon that was parked on our left would be used to transport them to jail cells in a police station while they waited for their trials.

I watched as a man in the Antifa group ran downhill on Bowdoin Street towards City Hall. I assumed that an officer had decided that he had broken a law or assaulted an officer and that the officer wanted to arrest him. I saw an officer run after him, but I didn't see whether the officer caught the man.

Instead of using the police wagon to hold a group of Antifa members, as many of us hoped, one of the police officers asked us to enter the wagon, which only had enough space for ten people. Our group on the Common had 15-20 people in it, so not everyone could fit inside the wagon.

Those of us inside the wagon were given a safe and uneventful ride to another location a few blocks away, where we were able to begin our trip home. I've been told that the members of our group who didn't ride in the wagon also made it home safely, despite the obvious attempts of Antifa to commit multiple acts of violence.

The Boston Police Department made an arrest that afternoon

This section was added on January 24, 2019.

The photo on the right was sent to me by a friend. The information next to it was found on the website of the Boston Police Department.

A man named Kevin Chavez was arrested on January 19, 2019 by Officer Thomas Finn. The arrest took place in the A1 Police Precinct, specifically on Bowdoin Street at 1:47 p.m.

Our group was on Bowdoin Street at that time, and we all saw a police officer chasing someone.

Kevin is accused of three crimes - Disorderly Conduct, Assault and Battery on a Police Officer, and Resisting Arrest. He was arraigned on January 22^nd.. He returned to court on the 23^rd,, on February 13^th, and on February 27^th.

If he had resisted Marxism instead of being part of the Antifa gang, he probably would not have been arrested in the first place.

Two facts you won't hear from any feminist

The first woman who was ever elected to Congress was a Republican. Her name is Jeannette Rankin. Her historic election to the U.S. House of Representatives was made in 1916. She served one 2-year term from 1917-1919, and she was elected again to another 2-year term in 1940. This page about her is on the website of the nonpartisan Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives. BTW, no feminist organization made any attempt to celebrate in 2016 the 100^th anniversary of her groundbreaking 1916 election.

President Ronald Reagan put the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. Her name is Sandra Day O'Connor. No feminist organization ever cheered when she was nominated or when she was sworn-in as America's first female Justice on the court. The reason for this is because feminists don't care about women's achievements. They only care about women's "issues", which are the same thing as Democrat Party issues.

	This is a link to Jeannette's page on the History Channel website.

A sample news article about Jeannette Rankin

The Washington Post wrote an article on November 8, 2018 titled ‘I’m no lady. I’m a member of Congress’ and subtitled "The first women who roared into the House". These are the first three paragraphs. The link in the first paragraph was in their article. Please note that this newspaper is honest enough to say that Jeannette was a Republican.

So many women roared to victories in Tuesday’s elections that a record of more than 100 are slated to be in the U.S. House when it convenes in early 2019. That’s a long way from 1917, when Jeannette Rankin joined the chamber as its first and only female member.

The 36-year-old Rankin won election as a Republican in Montana after campaigning on horseback. She was nationally known as a leader in the suffrage movement and had helped women in Montana win the vote in 1914. She promised to work “for laws that women shall be paid the same wages as men for equal amounts of work.”

Rankin’s arrival in Congress on April 1, 1917, was front-page news across the country. As a male Montana lawmaker escorted Rankin to her seat in the rear center of the House, all the members and spectators in the gallery rose cheering. Rankin wore a dark dress and no hat, the Associated Press reported. Congressmen treated her politely, but one newspaper warned her against venturing into the Republican cloakroom, where she would have to endure “swear words and mingled grades of tobacco smoke.”

The 5th paragraph of the same article shows more of her career.

The congresswoman earned respect by pushing her women’s rights agenda, but in 1918, she lost her bid for a Senate seat that would have made her the first woman in that chamber. As a lobbyist, she helped win passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, in 1920. She was elected to the House again in 1940. When male lawmakers referred to her as “the lady from Montana,” she adopted a line from a female colleague: “I’m no lady. I’m a member of Congress.”

She had earned a special place in history by being elected by a majority of the people of her state. In 1916, Montana only had two people in the U.S. House of Representatives, Jeannette and a Democrat named John M. Evans. The photo on the right is copied from his Wikipedia page.

Note that the article above is only partly about Jeannette. The rest of it is about women who were elected to Congress in 2016, which is when the article was written.

These news stories and articles, published in 2016, are about Jeannette, but none of the feminist organizations celebrated her centennial anniversary. They are arranged in chronological order, oldest first.

New York Times, July 28, 2016	The Missoulian, August 1, 2016
Great Falls (MT) Tribune, November 2, 2016	Time Magazine, November 7, 2016
The Huffington Post, November 7, 2016	The Smithsonian Magazine, November 7, 2016
Montana Public Radio, November 8, 2016	Washington Post, December 8, 2016

The first four paragraphs of the June 8th page of a journal called Minn Post aren't written in a traditional style of journalism, but they are frighteningly honest and thus justifiably dangerous to the feminist cause.

Jeannette Rankin’s birthday isn’t until Saturday, and having been born on June 11 of 1880, she won’t be around to celebrate it. But Hillary Clinton gave Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, a slightly premature birthday present by declaring herself (herself being Clinton, not Rankin) the first woman ever to be the presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party.

The Clintonian declaration was slightly hedged, because of the Bernie Sanders problem. More on that below.

A few years ago, I launched a minor MinnPost/Black-Ink-only campaign (although I invite others to join) to make Rankin more famous than she is by writing about her every year on her birthday. But this year, I’m jumping the gun by a few days to link Rankin to Clinton’s achievement. I regret that Clinton couldn’t have saved her achievement until Saturday, and wish she had mentioned Rankin Tuesday night. But it will be forgiven. Maybe it was because Rankin was a Republican, but I doubt it.

Rankin should surely be an icon of feminism (and I don’t think she gets the attention she deserves among feminists) but even more so among pacifists, a group that has not expanded nearly as much as feminism since Rankin’s day.

The first two paragraphs of this November 2, 2016 Politico Magazine article are also not written in a traditional style of journalism, but because this article is on Politico's website, it is just plain frightening.

100 years and a day before Hillary Clinton will cast her vote in a bid to become the first female president of the United States, Jeannette Rankin, a 36-year-old rancher’s daughter from Missoula, Montana, who had devoted her early career to women’s suffrage and progressive reform causes, voted in her state’s federal and local elections. That night, when all the ballots were counted, she made history, becoming the first woman ever to be elected to Congress. “I may be the first woman member of Congress,” she declared after her landslide victory. “But I won’t be the last.”

No less than Hillary Clinton, another trailblazer, Rankin was deeply controversial in her time. But her career—and the controversy surrounding it—tells us a great deal about what’s changed in the past 100 years, and what hasn’t.

Massachusetts Matters

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

A different look at the 2019 Women's March