Honoring our Founding Mother
This morning, our Maine Women’s Lobby community is grieving after learning of the passing of our founder and lifelong champion for Women’s Rights, Representative Lois Galgay Reckitt.
She was more than a legislator, more than an activist, more than a nonprofit director. Over the course of her lifetime, she tried every tool available to her to build the change she dreamed of: she was a community activist for domestic violence, who brought that work to the organizational level as director of Family Crisis Services. She founded an advocacy organization - the Maine Women’s Lobby - in partnership with other powerhouse women, to ensure that we all had more access to the levers of power. After retiring, her work wasn’t over: she was elected to the Maine House of Representatives, in order to directly change the policies that could impact people’s lives. Throughout, she modeled the courage of her commitments, as an open lesbian working for queer rights, as an activist for a range of bills both common sense and controversial. Her doggedness was what we admired most about her, and fear never held her back.
In recent years, Rep. Reckitt talked about coming to terms with the fact that she would not see an end to violence against women in her lifetime. As an organization committed to gender equity, we know we have so much more to do in that regard. In fact, many of the efforts she championed - domestic and sexual violence response, trafficking response, and more - continue to plague our communities. The Equal Rights Amendment has received declining support in recent years as partisanship has ticked upwards. And yet. She kept going, knowing that we cannot stop, that small changes add up to big changes over a lifetime. She may not be there with us to see it, but her vision and work laid the foundation, and we know those days will come.
In the coming weeks, we will be working with our Board, our founders, and our community partners to create space to honor her legacy. And we will be working as an organization to honor that legacy in the best way we know how: to continue to show up, to champion bills that make real changes in the lives of Mainers, to build coalitions and solidarity around gender justice, to fill the halls of the State House with the voices of women, queer folks, Black and brown folks, and people whose voices have been silenced. Just like Lois, we won’t stop working for what we know is right.
