November 7 · This Day in America
On November 7, 1916, voters in Montana elect Jeannette Rankin to the United States House of Representatives. She is the first woman ever sent to Congress — and she wins four years before the Nineteenth Amendment guarantees most American women the right to vote at all. Think about that. The men of a Western state put a woman in the national legislature before the nation would even let all women choose her. Rankin had spent years organizing for suffrage door to door; now she would write the laws. "I may be the first woman member of Congress," she said, "but I won't be the last." She was right by a margin of hundreds. She also cast a lonely vote against entering both world wars, and never apologized for either. First in, and unbought.
Source: history.house.gov
Also on this day · 1940
On November 7, 1940, a forty-mile-an-hour wind sets the four-month-old Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington undulating like a ribbon, the roadway twisting until it shatters into Puget Sound. No one is killed. The footage — a suspension span rippling like water — becomes the most famous failure in engineering, taught to students for generations as the day a bridge reminded humans to respect the air it hangs in.
Source: www.loc.gov
“I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won't be the last.”Jeannette Rankin, 1916