Montana elected Republican Jeannette Rankin as the first woman to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives three years before American women nationwide could legally vote.
A persistent advocate for women’s rights, particularly suffrage, Rankin voted in Congress against American entry into both world wars, and late in life led marches against the Vietnam war.
Rep. Jeannette Rankin with her colleagues in the 61st Congress.
Jeannette Rankin was the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, and a native of Missoula, Montana. She was elected in 1916, before women nationwide had the right to vote. In 1917 she joined a handful of representatives who voted against entry into World War I asserting, despite harsh criticism and certain damage to her career, that, “the first time the first woman had a chance to say no against war she should say it.” In 1941 she bravely stood alone in Congress in voting against entry into World War II, but she did not stand alone in society in her opposition to institutional violence and war. Her stand against war as a viable resolution to international conflicts provoked questions on the basic assumptions about peace, war, and conflict, which we continue to grapple with today. Rankin’s staunch opposition to war made her a spokesperson for veteran’s rights, as well, since she recognized them as pawns in the games of politicians. It was she who first introduced the GI Bill to Congress, which guaranteed post-discharge education and other benefits to those who served in the military. Her long career was also distinguished by her deep commitment to the country’s women, poor, and its children. She put forth an alternate vision for this country as one which championed peace and justice. She worked tirelessly in opposition to war and oppression by attending rallies, and by giving speeches in person and on television into her 90s.
The Jeannette Rankin Peace Center is proud to carry the name of this pioneer Montanan whose life’s work exemplified a steadfast devotion to peace, justice, and democratic equality. Jeannette Rankin was, in many ways, the first lady of U.S. politics. Her legacy lives on today through those who carry on her work and honor her memory. University of Montana’s Archives and Special Collections houses a collection of oral history interviews that were conducted by Dawn Walsh for the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center. The interviewees were former and current members of the Missoula Women for Peace and detail their interest and activities related to peace activism. These interviews are available in both audio and text format through University of Montana Scholar Works. (snip-MORE)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) faced a major legal setback as federal judges in New Jersey and Texas criticized the agency over prolonged detentions and repeated violations of court orders.
A federal judge in New Jersey wrote a withering critique of the agency and the Department of Justice (DOJ) over what he described as widespread violations of court orders in immigration matters. Meanwhile, in Texas, another federal judge ordered that an ICE detainee be given a bond hearing or be released, continuing a string of rulings challenging the agency’s mandatory detention policy.
A Department of Homeland Security agent wearing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement patch and badge at Royalston Square on January 22 in Minneapoli… | Jim Watson – Pool/Getty Images
These back-to-back rulings place ICE’s operations under increased court scrutiny amid ongoing tensions between immigration authorities and federal judges. Courts across the country have increasingly pushed back against what they view as procedural lapses or administrative overreach in detention practices under the Trump administration’s expansion of mandatory detention and mass deportations.
DHS has frequently criticized federal judges whose rulings slowed or blocked deportations, often labeling them as “activist judges.” Trump officials have argued that these judicial interventions interfere with enforcement priorities and complicate efforts to remove individuals quickly, framing the courts as obstacles to the administration’s immigration agenda.
New Jersey Judge Slams ICE Over Repeated Court-Order Violations
New Jersey District Judge Michael Farbiarz issued a strongly worded order pointing to dozens of instances in which ICE and the DOJ failed to comply with judicial directives concerning the detention and transfer of immigration detainees, according to a court filing reviewed by Newsweek.
The case involves Baljinder Kumar, who filed a habeas petition challenging his detention without a bail hearing. A January 26 injunction barred ICE from transferring Kumar out of the district, but the agency moved him to Texas on January 31, per the filings.
Farbiarz noted the scale of the problem, writing in a court opinion that “no-transfer injunctions issued by New Jersey district judges have been recently violated 17 times by the Respondents,” about “three every two weeks.”
The court acknowledged an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which concluded that the transfers “occurred inadvertently due to logistical delays in communicating the court order to the relevant custodians or to administrative oversight of the court order,” and that ICE had “agreed to return the petitioner to the District of New Jersey to regain compliance.”
Court filings showed violations of more than 50 orders over roughly 10 weeks, including cases in which detainees were moved or deported despite explicit court prohibitions.
“The revelation that the Department of Homeland Security violated dozens of judicial orders in New Jersey is shamefully unsurprising. This isn’t just inadvertent or sloppy; the Trump administration has repeatedly flouted judicial orders and attacked the integrity of judges,” ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha said in a statement.
Texas Ruling Orders Bond Hearing or Release for ICE Detainee
A federal judge in the Western District of Texas has ordered ICE to either hold a bond hearing or release a Mexican national who has been detained for more than eight months without a final removal order at the Camp East Montana detention facility, according to court filings.
On March 2, Senior U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama ruled that Victor Zamudio Sanchez’s continued detention without a hearing violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
Guaderrama wrote in court documents, “Respondents, by detaining Petitioner without the opportunity for a custody redetermination hearing, have deprived Petitioner of his procedural due process rights.”
The judge directed that if Sanchez was not released by March 9, ICE must provide a bond hearing before an immigration judge.
At that hearing, the government would be required to prove, “by clear and convincing evidence, the dangerousness or flight risk justifying Petitioner’s continued detention,” according to the filing.
Sanchez, who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, has been held without a meaningful opportunity to challenge his confinement, the court said. Guaderrama emphasized that the prolonged detention, absent any individualized assessment, posed a serious risk of “erroneous deprivation of [Petitioner’s liberty] interest.”
The court found that Sanchez had been caught in a procedural limbo, with ICE failing to issue a timely Notice to Appear and repeatedly denying him a bond hearing. While the agency eventually initiated formal removal proceedings, the judge ruled that Sanchez’s indefinite detention violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, ordering ICE either to release him or provide a bond hearing.
The administration has interpreted federal law to allow ICE to hold many noncitizens without bond hearings, applying mandatory detention to people who entered the United States without inspection, even if they have lived in the country for years. This represents a departure from decades of practice, when many detainees could seek release while their cases proceeded.
In the previous post, I spoke on how I was so very tired of the political climate. One of the issues that I described was this constant stress of chaos that the drumpf administration purveys upon the American public and the world in general. Stress is debilitating. It leaves a person living in a constant state of fight/flight, questioning what we should be doing to survive the madness that is maga and a perpetual attack upon our empathy for those not so fortunate to only be stressed. There is a saying that goes generally that if you can’t do anything about it, don’t stress over it. But, I’m stressed.
Much of my stress is my own personal life challenges, but a lot of my stress comes in the realization that while I may hope to ignore those things that are beyond my control, others are not so free. How many lives have been destroyed in the turmoil of one man’s pursuit of totalitarianism? How many deaths do we lay at the feet of this conman? And worse, however reluctantly and contrary to our wishes, he is our leader and we are responsible for the atrocities he commits.
Let’s face it, he told us who he was before being elected – for the second damned time! He showed us he was a fraud, a rapist, a serial adulterer, a racist, a criminal. He stole from children, from his workers, from his wives.
So, right or wrong, earned or borrowed, stress presses down on me and many like me. And that chronic stress severely impacts our health by keeping us in that fight or flight reflex, leading to our burnout, mental impairment and physical illness. We struggle with chronic pain, insomnia, high blood pressure and a weakended immunity. We are anxious, depressed, and can’t remember why we came into the damned room!
Is this what it means to be an adult, or just an adult in the drumpf era? My god! I watch the news and find myself in line for ptsd treatment! What could be next? What ball will I drop next? What emotional eruption is next in line for me?
I’m so f’ing tired of being tired; I’m so f’ing tired of being depressed; I’m so very f’ing tired of being anxious.
Today one of my workers asked me if I was ok. He saw that I was angry, I guess. I laughed for a moment, told him I was fine and that my back was just hurting, that it was a typical Monday. He just stood there, in front of my desk and waited. And somehow I found myself very quietly saying no. I’m not ok.
I don’t really have the freedom to be anything but ok. I am the one that has to be there making sure things get done. I am supposed to be watching out for the morale of the team. I’m charged with the continuity of employment. I’m supposed to be the strong one, the boss. And there I was realizing that everything was broken, and there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.
I don’t have answers to a damned thing, but today someone stopped what they were doing long enough to demonstrate that they cared, and I realized just how powerful that could be. It didn’t solve my problems, the sun didn’t shine any brighter and the birds weren’t singing overhead, but for a moment my burden was shared. For a moment I didn’t feel quite so alone. That made a huge difference. I hope I’m strong and wise enough to emulate that, and perhaps together we can outlast this too. Hugs.
In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media.
The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out.
“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.”
In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote.
Brockman concludes the email by citing #MeToo and mentioning the news of another scientist, whose book he had tried to publish, coming under fire for sexual harassment allegations. He wonders whether it might be best for optics if the disgraced financier — the biggest financial backer to Brockman’s nonprofit Edge Foundation — didn’t attend after all.
“Me-Too is not going away; it’s growing, it’s all-pervasive and we’re now in a McCarthy-ism moment on steroids.”
Brockman did not respond to a request for comment.
The 2018 exchange, which was revealed as part of a trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. He was well connected to scientists at top universities who continued to associate with him after a 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed.
“I think we all had a sense that the system wasn’t super fair, right?” said Nicole Baran, a member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organization that started in 2016 to combat racism and misogyny in STEM — or science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Seeing some of these emails — and peering behind the curtains of the rooms that we were never invited into, I think has really laid bare, I don’t know, just truly how broken and corrupt the system is.”
The emails are a reminder to women like Baran that the profession, at its highest levels, still operates under the gaze of men. And in a field where funding is scarce — and climbing the career ladder is often only possible through a combination of luck, mentorship and networking — the files reveal the ways sexism and misogyny still hold women back.
For the boys in the club, the arrangement worked to their benefit. Epstein donated millions of dollars to their research, hosted them at networking dinners at his home, invited them to visit his island or his ranch in Santa Fe, and connected them to potential funders to further their work.
As a result, these men were able to establish their own well-funded labs to pursue their work, land lucrative book deals and make connections to other prominent men, particularly those in Silicon Valley who were working on technological advancements like AI.
But as the emails reveal, these same men did not see women as intellectual equals.
Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.”
“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.”
(Epstein’s emails and those of his correspondents often contained typos; The 19th is reproducing the text as it appears in the files released by the Justice Department.)
Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
The email was sent in 2017, more than a decade after Summers came under fire for a speech he gave at a conference for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, where he suggested that there weren’t as many women smart enough to be in these professions due to higher variability in men’s intelligence. During his time as president he was also scrutinized for the lack of women in tenured positions. The Guardian reported that under his reign the share of tenured positions offered to women fell from 36 percent to 13 percent.
In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”
For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.”
“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”
Importantly, she says, the ways in which women are talked about, and also excluded from the connections these men had, have professional repercussions
“Women scientists aren’t necessarily the people that come to mind for certain men when they’re thinking about who they’re inviting to dinner or who they’re inviting to a conference,” she said.
Not having that visibility can matter when it comes to achievements like being offered a tenured position — the height of stability in academia. “Often the tenure board will reach out for letters of recommendation from other people at other institutions in the field. Certainly, the more you’re known broadly, the better it is for your career in terms of tenure.”
Other scientists, like Alison Twelvetrees, a neurobiologist based in the United Kingdom, said she was not as surprised by the contents of the emails. “You just feel that it’s happening, even if you’re not privy to the exact contents of the conversations.”
In her career, she said she’s often been the only woman in the room. “You become very aware of the — I mean a very British way of putting this — blokey banter that you’re not a part of and you kind of feel that exclusion.”
For Twelvetrees, the emails also showed how these scientists would let things slide in their interactions with Epstein. “A lot of men who get to the top, they’re cowards,” she said. “So even if they’re aware that they’re not supposed to condone the way people are speaking, or they shouldn’t be that way in those environments, they will condone it,” she said. “It’s that sort of cowardice to [not] be an active bystander and not call it out. It’s still the majority.”
She sees a connection between the ways women are talked about in the files and the response to a recent push to strip Elon Musk of his fellow title at the Royal Society, the U.K.’s premier scientific institution, after his AI tool, Grok, was given the capability to undress women and girls.
So far, the head of the institute has said the only reasons to strip fellows of their titles is if they’ve conducted scientific misconduct, things like falsifying data, Twelvetrees said. “[Elon’s] used the products of science to make his personal AI assistant Grok a mass engine of misogyny and white supremacy. I don’t understand how that isn’t scientific misconduct.”
In January, X, formerly known as Twitter, announced it had limited image generation to paid users and added additional safety guardrails. However, reporting has shown Grok can still generate explicit images despite these changes.
For her, it’s just another example of men not being allies to women. “It’s these people at the top just sort of being pretty casual about stuff they should be standing up to,” she said.
Outside of quipping about women’s intelligence, some of the emails show men talking about young women in their profession in ways that are degrading. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University who corresponded with Epstein many times, recommending an undergrad student for a possible job, describing her to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde.” Yale has since placed Gelernter on leave, while they review his conduct.
In another series of exchanges, Epstein and Summers discuss a woman whom Summers said he was mentoring, but who he implied he wanted to sleep with. He has since clarified to the Harvard Crimson the woman was not a student. In November, he told the student newspaper that he was deeply ashamed of his actions and takes full responsibility “for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” He has stepped down from public positions including at the Center for American Progress and on the board of OpenAI.
The interactions revealed in the files are “very dehumanizing” for women, according to Baran, an assistant professor of biology at Davidson College. “I think especially when you think about like, these are men who had colleagues [and] mentees that were women,” she said. “And I think what was so clear is the way in which women in particular were just not spoken about as people with equal intellectual capacity and power.”
The revelations also made her question some of the work produced by some of the men scientists connected to Epstein, including researchers she teaches in her own classes. “It’s really hard to separate the science that these people created from the theories that are considered sort of foundational,” she said. “Especially in this area of psychology and evolution in particular, where I’m finding it just really hard to disentangle [from their] behavior in their personal life that seems so egregious and horrific.”
As an assistant professor of biology, it’s made her think of the young women she sees going into the sciences today. “Will their ideas be taken seriously?” she wonders. “Will their creativity, brilliance or ingenuity be taken seriously? Or will it be dismissed or ignored?”
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