Minnette Doderer was a champion for women's rights in Iowa

In women’s rights as in our politics, Iowa has historically been a bit schizophrenic, that is, holding contradictory and antagonistic attitudes.  Iowa has an interesting record on civil rights in general with some things to be proud of, historic “firsts” and some troubling “nevers”:

• Iowa’s “underground railroad” famously helped escaped slaves reach freedom prior to the civil war.

• A state that is 97% white, we made history through the Iowa caucuses by launching the campaign that resulted in the nation’s first black president.

•  Our state supreme court recently gave gay people the right to marry, yet Iowa Republicans’ distinct anti-gay, ultra-conservative wing, staged a successful, ad campaign based on voters’ ignorance of the issues and managed to punish judges on the court who supported the ruling by getting them voted out of office.

Women’s voting rights:

• Iowans defeated  attempts to grant full voting rights to Iowa women prior to ratification of the 19th Amendment which guaranteed women the right to vote.

• In 1980 and 1992 Iowa voters rejected an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution but paradoxically, we supported a federal Equal Rights Amendment.

When it comes to women’s progress in education, Iowa also has a strange mix of “firsts” and “nevers”:

• The University of Iowa was the first public university in the U.S. to admit women and men on an equal basis in 1847.

•  Iowa was also the first state to admit women to the practice of law. Arabella A. Mansfield from Burlington, Iowa was the nation’s first woman lawyer back in 1869. wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabella_A._Mansfield

But Iowa has never sent a woman to congress.

Iowa has never had a woman governor.

So let’s send a woman to Congress next year.