By Victor M. Parachin

Conviction . . . is worthless till it convert itself into conduct.

That observation was made by the 19th-century political philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Here are three trailblazing women who had the courage of their convictions and, as a result, helped people gain a new vision for improving their world.

The first American to issue a report on prison conditions was Dorothea Dix (1802-1887). This was a woman who used her pain for gain to many others. Her father, a physician, was both alcoholic and mentally ill. That experience would eventually lead Dix to galvanize public interest in helping the mentally ill. When she was 12, her parents separated and she, along with her siblings, was sent to live with relatives in Boston. As a young teen, she wanted to become a teacher, and at age 15 set up her own school where she was barely older than some of her students. She taught and ran the school until she became ill with tuberculosis in 1841. While recuperating she was invited to visit a local jail in order to teach a Sunday-school class. To her horror, she recognized that many of the incarcerated were simply mentally ill people locked up with hardened career criminals.

Appalled, she found her mission in life. Living off a small inheritance, Dix began touring Massachusetts penal institutions. She traveled to more than 500 towns and villages across the state over the next two years carefully recording conditions as she found them. Dix put her notes into a report and presented her findings to the state legislature, which in 1843 passed a bill providing better facilities for the mentally ill. Her interest in this cause prompted her to travel across the United States and Canada collecting statistics, data, and other pertinent information on the mentally ill. In 1854 she journeyed to Europe where she did the same. Over the course of her life she is credited with founding or substantially improving 32 hospitals for the mentally ill. In recognition of her skill and commitment, Dix was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses when the Civil War erupted in 1861. In that capacity, Dix organized hospitals, set up and staffed smaller infirmaries, and worked to ensure that medical supplies and facilities were where they were needed. She died in one of the hospitals she had founded.

In 1909 Congress appropriated $10,000 to establish a monument at her birthplace. The report of the congressional committee noted: “Miss Dix occupies a conspicuous place in history as a philanthropist. Certainly no other woman in modern times has done more to earn the gratitude of the people of this country than this self-sacrificing and devoted woman. Her services during the Civil War as chief of he hospital nurses of the United States and her wonderful success in establishing institutions for the insane — over 30 in number — in the South and West and elsewhere in the country, place her among the noblest examples of humanity in all history.”

At 87 years of age, on January 15, 1968, Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) led a band of 5,000 protesters, dubbed the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, on a march to Washington, D.C., protesting the Vietnam War. She was the oldest of seven children of Missoula, Montana, ranchers. Rankin graduated from the University of Montana in 1902, was employed in social work, became a leader in the campaign for women’s suffrage, and helped women gain the right to vote in Montana in 1914. She held national political office only twice. Each time was for one term before being promptly and soundly voted out for her anti-war position. She was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916 as a Republican from Montana. Shortly after arriving in Washington, she was faced with a vote on whether or not the United States should declare war on Germany and, thus enter World War I. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she declared succinctly. “I vote no!” That stand caused her to be defeated in her bid for re-election in 1919.

Through the decades Rankin lobbied for women’s equal opportunity, aid to children, freedom of speech, and antiwar causes. She was heavily involved in the Women’s Peace Union, with the stated goal of a constitutional amendment to outlaw war. Running as a pacifist, she returned to Congress in 1941 for a second term in the House of Representatives. On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress voted to enter World War II. Rankin again voted “No” to war, the only member of the House and Senate to cast a dissenting vote. That effectively ended her political career. Of both “No” votes, she indicated no regrets. Indeed, following the 1917 vote she said: “It was not only the most significant thing I ever did. It was a significant thing in itself.”

After leaving office, Rankin returned to ranching in Montana and continued studying and speaking out on anti-war issues. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Rankin made seven trips to India between 1946 and 1971. She opposed war in Korea and Vietnam as vocally as ever. Her messages often contained the line: “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

Upon first meeting the school teacher who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, President Abraham Lincoln said: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was born into a gifted family where moral and intellectual values were vigorously promoted. She was the seventh of the nine children of the prominent Congregational minister, Lyman Beecher, and his wife Roxana Foote. Harriet taught school until her marriage to Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of biblical interpretation. They had seven children in turn.

To help support her large and growing family, Harriet turned to writing. First, a geography text for children, then a series of stories about life in New England. Like many intellectuals in the North, Harriet was an ardent abolitionist. Drawing on contemporary accounts of the horrors of slavery which she read about in newspapers and magazines, she wrote articles that were serialized in The National Era, an anti-slavery weekly, from June 1851 to April 1852. Because her writings appealed to a sizeable readership, they were collected and published as the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in March 1852. It immediately broke all sales records for any book of the 19th century selling half a million copies by 1857. Author’s royalties exceeded $10,000, an enormous sum at the time. Uncle Tom’s Cabin also inspired a large number of spin-off products — most of them unauthorized — such as toys, songs, plays, and china figurines based on the novel’s leading characters. The book was also a big hit in Europe. By 1879 the British Museum contained 43 English editions and 19 translations of it. For all of its wide appeal, there were and still are critics who say the work contains too much racist “melodrama.” Her character Uncle Tom was too accommodating of white power and became a symbol of spineless complicity in slavery. In spite of it’s flaws, “the little woman’s” book pushed the nation into dealing directly and definitively with the issue of slavery.

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