Lorissa Rinehart is a women’s historian, author, and social entrepreneur whose work explores the intersections of women’s history, politics, war, and peace.

She is the author of Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become America’s First Congresswoman, praised by Publishers Weekly as “an illuminating biography,” and First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent, which received national acclaim.

Through her newsletter and podcast, The Female Body Politic, she connects 250 years of women’s political engagement to today’s headlines. She is also the co-founder of the Santa Barbara Literary Festival, launching in May 2026.

Take it away, Lorissa!

When did you first become interested in women’s history?  What sparked that interest?

My initial interest in women’s history was part therapy, part activism, and part spiritualism. I was going through a particularly difficult period in my life with a career I wasn’t passionate about, a truly toxic job, and a bad relationship in a string of bad relationships.

I was adrift without much direction, in large part because I didn’t have any past role models whose legacies I could look to for guidance, wisdom, strength, and inspiration. There was also – and to a certain extent still is – this sense that women weren’t really the heroes of their own stories, but the “also rans” or appendages of their male counterparts. Cause for idle interest but not veneration. Without a past on which I could build a future, I was stuck in this constant present that was pretty bleak.

This wasn’t out of ignorance or a lack of engagement with history. I had always been a history buff. I was that kid in high school who spent lunch in the library reading about the Russian Revolution or Ancient Rome. It was just that women rarely appeared in those narratives, and if they did, they were whores, virgins, or witches for the most part and wives at best. I eventually came to believe that history wasn’t for me – and in many ways it wasn’t.

But, I started spiraling in my personal life – drinking too much, burning bridges, just being generally self-destructive, and I began going back to things I had once loved to hopefully find an anchor that I could cling to. One of those things was history. Except this time, I came to it with a very different lens.

While I was a middling professional at best, many of my female friends were absolute superstars in their fields, from finance to the arts to medicine. Yet, regardless of what they had achieved, they were constantly being passed over for promotion, having their ideas literally stolen, or being told that they didn’t deserve their success. This was, of course, absurd to me – I knew they were awesome. How could anyone not? So, I, and often they, believed it was a fluke, situational rather than systemic.

But when I dove back into history, I found that the very narratives that were being applied to my brilliant friends were applied to so many women in the past, and I began reading with a very different set of eyes.

If a woman was described as pushy, I read her as assertive. If she was promiscuous, I took it to mean she was in control of her own body. If she were a footnote, I figured she threatened the men around her. And if she was difficult – I knew she was powerful.

I discovered history is full of incredible women who have been ignored, undervalued, and silenced for too long, but whose voices have grown all the more powerful and whose lives have become all the more relevant to our own moment. Once I understood this, my own life started to change. Seeing this fierce courage in those who came before, I began to take more risks. I was willing to fail and also be proud of my success.  I felt empowered to pursue a dream I had harbored since I was a kid – to be a writer.

I began pitching stories about amazing yet overlooked women to the smallest journals and the biggest magazines. And they started replying with lots of nos, but some yeses too. Then, I got an agent, and soon after, I landed my first book deal for First To The Front, the biography of Dickey Chapelle, a trailblazing female combat photojournalist. Suddenly, the life I had always dreamed of living was no longer a dream, but a reality. I was a full-time writer.

Not because I wrote about women, but because the women I wrote about inspired me to live my passion and showed me that it could be done. And the rest is history, as they say.

What path led you to Jeannette Rankin, and  why do you think it’s important to tell her story today?

The path that led me to Jeannette Rankin is almost too uncannily coincidental to be believed, particularly given the incredible relevance of her story in our current moment in history.

After my first book about Cold War photojournalist Dickey Chapelle, I wanted to write a book on the history of small revolutions and rebellions during the Cold War that were far more pivotal in securing a free world than history often remembers.

But my publisher said they’d prefer another biography of a strong and relatively unknown American woman and asked me to send them 5 one-page pitches for women I might like to write about. Jeannette was one of them, and I figured they’d come back and ask for 2 or 3 ideas to be more fleshed out with a chapter synopsis, etc., etc.

Instead, they came back with a contract for Winning The Earthquake.

At the time I started writing, I actually did not know that much about Jeannette or her legacy. But as soon as I started diving in, it became clear that hers was one of the most important stories to be told, right now, with all we are facing in America and around the world.

At the time, Jeannette was campaigning for women’s suffrage in Congress; her home state of Montana was known as a “One Company State” because the Anaconda Copper Mining Company controlled almost every aspect of life. It owned all of Montana’s mining interests and, by proxy, controlled the economy. They bought all but one major newspaper in the state, thereby controlling the news. They even consolidated Montana’s entire power grid. AND, they bribed every elected official to the degree that at the opening of every State Legislative Session, Anaconda paid for a bar and brothel crawl for every elected official down the length of Helena’s main street, Last Chance Gulch, just to make sure they started off the year in a mood to bend the knee to their wishes and an understanding of who actually pulled the strings.

But wait, there’s more.

Jeannette’s first act in office was to vote on whether or not America should join the Great War. Even then, she understood very clearly that war is almost always at the behest of the rich and powerful and at the expense of the people. She also understood that if America joined this war, it would sweep away all of the Progressive reforms so many had worked towards for generations and usher in an era dominated by the military-industrial complex. Talk about prescient.

Her second act was to introduce the bill that would become the 19th Amendment, which somehow we find ourselves defending today. She went on to introduce the first bill appropriating federal funds for women’s health. She also took down the five-term Director of the Printing and Engraving Bureau, Joseph Ralph, who was, along with his all-male managing staff, physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing the bureau’s female employees.

AND.

Right after Jeannette was elected, Anaconda Copper went to the Montana State Legislature, which it bought and paid for, and demanded that she be gerrymandered out of her district. She then spent the next 20 years lobbying for global disarmament, famously declaring that“if you prepare for peace, you get peace. If you prepare for war, you get war.”

The  parallels continue. But suffice to say, we are living through her legacy.

How does Rankin fit into the  larger framework of feminism and social activism in the United States in the early twentieth century?

I don’t often get mad. But what I learned while writing this book really ticked me off.

Basically, while Jeannette was extraordinary, she was not unique. The early 20th Century is absolutely replete with women who not only changed the lives of those around them, but also altered the course of history and shaped our understanding of American life and democracy.

Take for instance Florence Kelley who was a co-founder and first general secretary (old-timey talk for CEO) of the National Consumers League. While Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously alerted the public to the abhorrent conditions in meatpacking plants, it was Kelley and those she worked with who actually lobbied Congress, drafted bills, and ultimately shepherded reforms through. They were also diligent in documenting these conditions so there could be no question as to the veracity of workers’ claims of abuse.

Then there’s Ida B. Wells, who was literally born into slavery and, once freed, dedicated herself to the pursuit of truth through the lens of journalism. She was among the first to document the systemic lynching of Black people throughout the South while absolutely burning down the absolute lie that the victims of lynchings were criminals.

Finally, I would point to Mary G. Harris Jones, aka Mother Jones, a refugee of the Great Famine who came to this country as a child and saw the exact models of exploitation she had witnessed as a colonial subject of England being applied to the industrial workers of the United States. Divide, conquer, oppress. She responded by becoming one of America’s preeminent labor organizers who brought the utter cruelty of child labor to national attention, stood up to the private armies of coal barons, led numerous strikes, and inspired thousands of workers to demand their right to organize.

Just to recap: Jeannette Rankin fundamentally reshaped who could participate in government both through the ballot box and in elected office. Florence Kelley literally created, out of thin air, the very notion of consumer safety, and then made it a reality. Ida B. Wells trail-blazed the field of investigative journalism. And Mother Jones gave birth to the modern labor movement.

In no uncertain terms, these are the four pillars of contemporary American life and democracy – all built by women. And yet these very women are ignored, erased, and omitted almost entirely from history. And this really ticked me off.

Not only because they deserve their due, but also because when we see these four pillars under assault, which threatens to crash the very roof of civil society down on our heads, it is clear that this attack is not new. It’s just a more brutal onslaught at the end of a long campaign of quiet eroding.

So, as to the question of how she fits into the larger framework of early 20th-century feminist activism, Jeannette is an integral part of a complex ecosystem that created what we currently understand to be American society, but the complexity and reverberations of which are only now beginning to be understood.

A couple of questions from Lorissa:

I love seeing all your posts, projects, and updates on social media.  You seem to be perennially busy. But it begs the question: How do you juggle being an entrepreneur and a historian and an author?

The short answer is, I am not only perennially busy, but perennially overwhelmed.

If you’re looking for the nuts and bolts:

• I rely on a paper calendar that lets me see the whole month at once and a bullet journal that lets me make a plan one day at a time. I separate out the life admin stuff and the writing/speaking stuff into two separate to-do lists.
• I defend my mornings, which are my best work time. If I can get in three or four hours at the beginning of the day I am a happy writer.
• I don’t keep the global to-do lists on the daily calendar. Instead I’ve adapted a 3 and 3 approach for my daily to-do list from Oliver Burkeman.  I identify the top three things I need to work on during the day, and then a second set of three smaller things I need to work on. I inevitably don’t get to all six things. Often I end up doing something else all together in response to something urgent that comes up. But at least I’m not staring at all the things that remain undone, which would make me crazy.
• Spreadsheets keep from losing my mind on large projects with lots of details to track, like this series
• Other things that help me keep my butt in the chair, and also help me get out of the chair on regular basis: a timer/stopwatch, two on-line co-writing groups, and a Facebook-based accountability group of writers, scholars, and one very creative artist. (You people are the best. *waves*)

And I still occasionally drop the ball.

What advice would you give to aspiring historians who are looking a particularly bleak job market?

I am probably the worst person in the world to answer this question.

Forty years ago (45 years ago if you want to be picky), the first thing my graduate school advisor said to me was “You do know there are no jobs, right?” Without the promise of a teaching job at the end of the road, I organized my life accordingly. I got a “real” job that was interesting enough to keep me interested while I took the long road to finishing my dissertation. And I poked at anything that caught my imagination. Finally I drifted into writing. That is not a replicable model.

Is there any advice to be had in there? Figure out what you really want to do as a historian. (It may not be what you assume it is.) If you really think you want to be a professor, talk to some people who are working academics about what their work life looks like. Explore all the opportunities.

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Want to know more about Lorissa and her work?

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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with literary historian Sharon M Harris