The Maine Suffrage Centennial Collaborative teamed up with Masthead Maine to create a series of articles on the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. We reached out to a wide variety of women throughout Maine to give us their perspective on this historic anniversary. The series will run during both the Maine Suffrage Centennial in 2019 and the national Centennial in 2020.
Anne B. Gass is the author of Voting Down the Rose: Florence Brooks Whitehouse and Maine’s Fight for Woman Suffrage, published in 2014. She is Whitehouse’s great-granddaughter and speaks regularly on Florence Brooks Whitehouse and women’s rights history.
Gass serves on the Steering Committee of the Maine Suffrage Centennial Collaborative and as the Maine Coordinator for the National Votes for Women Trail, a project of the National Collaborative for Women's History Sites. She also serves on Maine’s Permanent Commission of the Status of Women.
As a professional, Gass has continued her great-grandmother’s activist tradition. She is the founder of ABG Consulting LLC, which has written over $163 million in successful federal grants to support nonprofits, local and state governments, and foundations in their efforts to help people in need build stable, productive lives.
Gass received her BA degree from Reed College in 1982 and an MA from the University of Maryland in 1987.
https://www.pressherald.com/2019/07/21/insight-1919-the-year-maine-women-won-the-vote/
When Maulian Dana, the first appointed Penobscot Nation Ambassador, looks outside her home on Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine, she sees a place to which her people have been connected physically and culturally for centuries. As she told Maine Women Magazine, “I come from a long line of tribal leaders, and I was raised by strong women…. Both of my grandmothers had leadership positions in the tribe, and my father was Penobscot chief when I was a teenager. Seeing my dad’s experiences as chief...helped shape who I am today.”
In addition to her role as the tribe’s Ambassador, Dana serves on the board of the Maine Center for Economic Policy and is serving a four-year term (selected in 2016) on the Penobscot Nation Tribal Council. Previously, Dana served as the Human Resources Director for the Penobscot Indian Nation Enterprises and worked in the Penobscot Nation Cultural & Historic Preservation Department. Having been raised on Indian Island, Dana has been able to take all that she learned within her community and share that information with the wider world through her activism. “I learned early on to speak my truth,” she says.
https://www.pressherald.com/2019/08/25/maulian-dana-many-still-silenced-after-women-got-the-vote/
Rhea Côté Robbins was brought up bilingually in Waterville, Maine in a Franco-American neighborhood known as “down the Plains”.
She is a founder and Executive Director of the Franco-American Women's Institute which promotes awareness about the contributions of Franco-American women to the culture, their families and their communities. She developed and taught several courses for the University of Maine offered through the Franco-American, Women & Gender, and University Studies programs. She is also the author of several books of creative non-fiction.
https://www.pressherald.com/2019/10/06/maine-suffrage-centennial-bilingual-quebec-immigrant/
Deqa Dhelac was elected to the South Portland City Council in 2018, becoming the first Muslim, Somali immigrant or woman of color to hold that office.
She came to the U.S. in 1992 from Somalia, East Africa. She holds a Masters Degree in Development Policy and Practice from the University of New Hampshire and a Masters Degree in Social Work from the University of New England. She has worked with the Opportunity Alliance, Somali Community Center of Maine and the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition, among many other organizations throughout southern Maine.
While she is proud to bring diversity the South Portland City Council, she also stresses that “the things we all have in common outweigh our differences.”
