Women’s Hall of Fame inducts Jane Fonda

U.S. SUPREME COURT Justice Sonia Sotomayor, actress Jane Fonda and attorney Gloria Allred were among the inductees at the National Women’s Hall of Fame on Saturday.

The Class of 2019 inducted into the hall in upstate New York also included activist Angela Davis, attorney Sarah Deer, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg , retired Air Force fighter pilot Nicole Malachowski, the late artist and suffragist Rose O’neill and the late U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York.

Composer Laurie Spiegel was honoured for her electronic music compositions, and molecular biologist Flossie Wongstaal for work that helped prove HIV is the cause of AIDS.

The hall in Seneca Falls, where a landmark U.S. women’s rights convention took place in 1848, doesn’t identify a theme when it calls for nominations, said induction chairwoman Sujatha Ramanujan. But she said sometimes a theme emerges, as it has this year, that reflects the political and social mood of the country. “It shows up in the nominations because we ask the general public,” Ramanujan said, “and in a time when women are feeling like their voices need to be heard, they’re nominating women whose voices were loud.”

Fonda’s selection led the Seneca Falls town supervisor to threaten to pull funding from the site. Greg Lazzaro wrote in a resolution, which did not pass, that Fonda’s activism during the Vietnam War “brought divisiveness to our country.” The actress drew bitter criticism after being photographed atop an anti-aircraft gun during a 1972 visit to North Vietnam, a moment she has said she regrets.

“There’s always going to be dissent,” Ramanujan said, recalling past pickets and protests. She said that Fonda is being honoured for a lifetime of achievement and that the hall stands by the selection.

“We don’t cull the list because of protest,” Ramanujan said. “We do also respect that people have different opinions, and we mean no disrespect to anyone.”