AOC likes to have gentle fun at the expense of her detractors:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Remember when Fox News made the grave mistake of actually telling people what we’re fighting for?
Ah, memories. https://t.co/RbliPl46Th" / Twitter
Right-wingers have mentioned Maxine Waters and Vito Marcantonio as two possibilities for AOC to be like. When she mentioned her aversion to military adventures, I thought of this woman:
Jeannette Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) She grew up in a ranch in Montana, and she noted that while both sexes labored side by side in ranch tasks, only men had a political voice or a right to vote. She went to college, then did a variety of jobs, like dressmaking and teaching and social work, then got into women's suffrage activism, getting women the right to vote.
Rankin later compared her work in the women's suffrage movement to promoting the pacifist foreign policy that defined her congressional career. She believed, with many suffragists of the period, that the corruption and dysfunction of the United States government resulted from the lack of women's participation. As she said at a disarmament conference in the interwar period, "The peace problem is a woman's problem".
I think that that is doubtful at best, but that was a common reason back then for keeping women out of politics and broader society more generally. JR and other early feminists then argued that this supposed feature of women was not a liability but an asset.
Women got the vote in Montana in 1914, the seventh state to do so, and in 1916, JR campaigned for a Montana seat of the US House of Representatives, going across the state, campaigning on a progressive platform, and being supported by her brother, a big-name Republican.
She got elected, with her election being big news. In her victory speech, she stated that "I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me" as the only woman in Congress. To this day, she is the only woman who has ever been elected to Montana's House delegation.
When President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917, to "make the world safe for democracy", she joined several other Congresspeople in voting against it. Being the only woman gave her a high profile, and her action got very mixed reviews. She also tried to improve working conditions for ordinary workers, and she also helped push a Constitutional amendment giving women voting rights in all states. It passed the House but not the Senate. She was not re-elected in 1918, and after she left office, the amendment passed both houses. It then went on to the states, becoming the 19th Amendment.
She bought a small farm in Georgia and lived very simply, though she continued her activism, supporting pacifism, welfare efforts, and a Constitutional amendment outlawing child labor. Late in the 1930's, she started seeing how unsuccessful her pacifist efforts were, as FDR did a military buildup and aided Britain. So in 1940, she ran for Congress in Montana again, unseating a prominent quasi-fascist in the primary and winning the general election.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, Congress voted unanimously to declare war on Japan with one exception - Jeannette Rankin. Many people got outraged at her, and at one point, she hid in a telephone booth. When Congress declared war on Germany and Italy two days later, she abstained. She did not run in 1942.
She then traveled the world, and in the late 1960's, she returned to antiwar activism yet again, objecting to the Vietnam War. She thought of running for Congress yet again, but she then decided that her health was too poor for that.
