Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Congress. She helped pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and was a committed pacifist.
Rankin was born in 1880 near Missoula, Montana. As a child, Rankin cleaned, sewed, and helped care for her younger siblings, in addition to sharing in the outdoor work and daily farm chores including maintaining the ranch machinery. She would later say that women of the 1890’s western frontier were the equals of men when it came to work but not when it came to politics since at that point in time, women did not have a legal right to vote.
Rankin attended the University of Montana and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. She tried her hand at a variety of jobs including teaching – following in the footsteps of her mother – dressmaking and briefly studied furniture design. On a trip to Boston in 1904 to visit her brother at Harvard University she was appalled at the slum conditions some people were forced to live in. She became a resident in a San Francisco Settlement House for four months before enrolling at the New York School of Philanthropy. After completing her studies, Rankin moved to Spokane, Washington to work as a social worker in a children’s home but she only lasted a few weeks.
Rankin then began studying at the University of Washington in Seattle where she became involved in the drive to amend the state’s constitution to give women the right to vote. While visiting Montana, Rankin became the first woman to speak before the Montana legislature, impressing both spectators and legislators alike with her eloquence.
She also organised and spoke for the Equal Franchise Society. In November 1910, Washington voters approved an amendment to their state constitution permanently enfranchising women, the fifth state in the Union to do so. Rankin then turned her attention to New York, where she became a professional lobbyist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and helped to organise the New York Women’s Suffrage Party. She also began a lifelong relationship with Katherine Anthony. In 1912 Rankin became the field secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
In 1913, Rankin was among the thousands of suffragists at the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, D.C which disrupted the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. Rankin gave up her position with the NAWSA to return to Montana for their suffrage campaign, her speaking and organising efforts helped Montana women gain unrestricted voting rights in 1914. She then ran for one of the two seats in Congress in Montana in the 1916 election, winning by a very close margin to become the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, and the first woman elected to a national legislature in any western democracy. Her accomplishment was remarkable, especially as most women still did not have the right to vote. Rankin was a pacifist and voted against the United States entering World War I, violating protocal by speaking during the roll call before voting, announcing “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.” During the war she fought for the rights of women working in the war effort. She created women’s rights legislation and helped pass the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Congress, granting women the right to vote. She also worked for political reforms including civil liberties, birth control, equal pay and child welfare.
After her two-year term ended in 1919 Rankin focused on pacifism, she served as a delegate to the Women’s International Conference for Peace in Switzerland and later became an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She also worked on the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Rankin lobbied for the Women’s Peace Union, for American cooperation with the World Court and for labor reforms including an end to child labor. In 1939 she returned to politics, running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives which she won because of her anti-war stance. After the attack on Pearl Harbour in on December 7, 1941 the U.S. public were so outraged by an attack on American soil that when she voted against the war resolution passed 388 votes –1 it was highly controversial and partly led to her leaving office in 1943.
Rankin spent a lot of her time travelling, continuing to work on furthering her pacifist beliefs and speaking out against U.S. military actions in Korea and Vietnam. In 1968, she led more than 5,000 women in a protest in Washington, DC to demand the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam. She headed a group calling itself the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. She was often invited to speak or honored by the young antiwar activists and feminists. Rankin was the only legislator to vote against both world wars and worked tirelessly on behalf of women’s suffrage. When Rankin died she left a portion of her Georgia estate to assist “mature, unemployed women workers.” A foundation was established to help adult women who face difficulties returning to school, it is now known as the Jeannette Rankin Foundation and continued to help mature, low-income women succeed through education.