RANKIN, JEANNETTE

Jeannette Pickering Rankin of Montana was the first woman in U.S. history to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A nonconformist Republican, she served two nonconsecutive terms in the House. Rankin is best remembered for her opposition to war. In 1917 she voted against the entry of the United States into world war i, and in 1941 she took the same position against U.S. involvement in world war ii. During the 1960s Rankin protested U.S. military action in Southeast Asia.

Rankin was born on June 11, 1880, on a ranch near Missoula, Montana. The oldest of seven children, Rankin was first among a family of high achievers. One of Rankin's sisters became dean of women at the University of Montana, and another taught in the English department there. Rankin's only brother and

another sister became well-known, politically connected attorneys.

Rankin was an intelligent but undistinguished student. She graduated from the University of Montana in 1902 with a bachelor's degree in biology and then taught school for six years. In 1908 she left Montana to seek other challenges.

Earlier Rankin had visited Boston where she saw urban slums for the first time. She vowed to help improve the living and working conditions of poor Americans. In 1908 Rankin entered the New York School of Philanthropy in New York

City (renamed the Columbia School of Social Work) and became a social worker.

In 1910 Rankin moved to Spokane, Washington, to work in a children's home. Inspired by the supporters of women's suffrage, Rankin concluded that good legislation was more effective than social work in solving society's problems. She joined the suffrage movement in Washington and campaigned successfully for an amendment to the state constitution that gave women the right to vote.

After victory in Washington, Rankin returned to her native Montana to work for women's suffrage. In what was a bold move at the time, Rankin addressed the state legislature on the issue, reminding lawmakers that all citizens in a democracy deserved a voice. Her lobbying and organizing efforts paid off, and Montana gave women the right to vote.

Rankin continued to spread her message by traveling across the country, giving pro-suffrage speeches. She became a prominent member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. At the same time, Rankin also became involved in the turn-of-the-century peace movement, helping establish the Women's Peace Party.

In 1917 Rankin decided to run for election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Montana had only one congressional district at the time because of its small population. Rankin campaigned for a federal suffrage amendment, stricter employment laws to protect women and children, and continued neutrality in the war being waged in Europe. She won the election by a very narrow margin, and at age thirty-six became the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Soon after she took office, Rankin's position on U.S. neutrality was tested. President woodrow wilson sought a U.S. declaration of war against Germany. On April 6, 1917, Rankin voted against U.S. involvement in World War I. Although forty-nine other representatives cast negative votes, Rankin's vote was widely publicized—and criticized—because she was the only female member of Congress.

Rankin was not reelected to Congress in 1918, in part because of her antiwar vote but also because she had antagonized powerful mining interests in Montana.

After her defeat Rankin resumed her work with the peace movement. She was a delegate to the Women's International Conference on Permanent Peace in Zurich where women analyzed the Versailles Peace Treaty of World War I. This process led to the formation of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1928 Rankin organized the Georgia Peace Society and in the 1930s she was a lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War.

When war erupted again in Europe in 1939, Rankin was convinced that most U.S. citizens shared her views on neutrality. She returned to Montana to run for the House of Representatives. Rankin was reelected and reentered Congress in 1941.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, shattered widespread support for U.S. neutrality. This time when President franklin d. roosevelt sought a declaration of war against Japan, Rankin was the only legislator to vote against it. Her vote, although consistent with her two decades of work in the international peace movement, was roundly criticized as unpatriotic. Rankin's political career was irreparably damaged, and she did not run for reelection.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Rankin traveled abroad and lived modestly in Georgia. The vietnam war drew her back into the public spotlight. In 1968 she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a half-million women demonstrating in Washington, D.C., against U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia. In 1969 she took part in antiwar protests in South Carolina and Georgia.

Rankin died on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, California.

"We're half the people; we should be half the Congress."
—Jeannette Rankin

further readings

Davidson, Sue. 1994. A Heart in Politics: Jeannette Rankin and Patsy T. Mink. Seattle: Seal Press.

Smith, Norma. 2002. Jeannette Rankin, America's Conscience. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press.

Stineman, Esther. 1980. American Political Women: Contemporary and Historical Profiles. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited.

cross-references

Nineteenth Amendment; Women's Rights.

RANKIN, JEANNETTE 1880-1973

First woman elected to congress

Lifelong Pacifist

Because she was the only member of Congress to cast her vote against war with Japan on 8 December 1941, Jeannette Rankin is associated by some with appeasement or even disloyalty. However, her vote was entirely consistent with the views she had championed since she had voted against American entry into World War I in 1917, and she had run for Congress in 1940 as an overtly antiwar candidate. A lifelong pacifist, she was also a leader in movements for women's suffrage and social justice. In 1968, at age 87, she led five thousand women in a march against the war in Vietnam, remaining true to her principles until the very end.

The First Congresswoman

Born on the western frontier in Montana on 11 June 1880, Rankin became active in the women's suffrage movement early and became legislative secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1913. Many western states adopted suffrage amendments before the federal government did, and Rankin was able to win election to Congress—the first woman ever to do so—from Montana in 1916. She introduced the first bill calling for full citizenship for women independent of their husbands. An early isolationist, she cast her vote against President Woodrow Wilson's call for war in 1917 along with forty-eight other members of Congress.

Standing Alone

Rankin's antiwar stand cost her the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1918, and she left the House to become a lobbyist for suffrage and to return to social work. As war again approached in the 1930s, she renewed her commitment to pacifism and successfully ran an explicitly isolationist, antiwar campaign for Congress once again. She created a national furor by casting her lone dissenting vote against entering the war in 1941, thereby destroying her political career forever. After leaving Congress she continued to lecture on feminism, becoming a model to the more radical feminists who emerged in the 1960s. Ending her life as she began it, she remained a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, dying only months after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973. Despite the unpopularity of her views and votes, she remained a symbol of political conviction and courage.

Source:

Hannah Joscphson, Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merricl, 1974).

Rankin, Jeannette (1880–1973), suffragist, pacifist, first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Born near Missoula, Montana Territory, the eldest of seven children of schoolteacher Olive Pickering and rancher John Rankin, Jeannette earned a B.S. in biology from the University of Montana in 1902 and studied social work at the New York School of Philanthropy and the University of Washington. While working in Seattle in 1909, Rankin joined Washington's successful woman suffrage movement. After campaigning for the cause in fifteen states in 1912–1914, she returned home to help win the vote for women in Montana. Elected to Montana's at‐large seat in Congress in 1916, Rankin was only four days into her term when she voted (with fifty‐six others) against a U.S. declaration of war on Germany. Failing in a reelection bid in 1918, she became a lobbyist and organizer for various peace groups. Throughout her life, Rankin championed two causes she believed were intertwined: women's rights and peace. Female voters, she contended, would counterbalance male militarism and eventually render war obsolete.

In 1940, Rankin returned to Congress and became the only member to vote against a declaration of war against Japan on 8 December 1941. This vote ended her political career; she resumed her efforts for peaceful alternatives to war. In 1968, at age eighty‐eight, Rankin led five thousand women calling themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in marching in Washington, D.C. against the Vietnam War. Rankin died of a heart attack in 1973 while considering a third congressional race to oppose what she saw as the growing risk of another world war.
See also Feminism; Pacifism; Peace Movements; Women's Rights Movements; World War I.

Bibliography

Hannah Geffen Josephson , First Lady in Congress, 1974.
Joan Hoff Wilson , ‘Peace Is a Woman's Job …’ Jeanette Rankin and American Foreign Policy: The Origins of Her Pacifism, Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Winter 1980): 28–41.
Joan Hoff Wilson , ‘Peace Is a Woman's Job …’ Jeanette Rankin and American Foreign Policy: Her Life Work as a Pacifist, Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Spring 1980): 38–53.

Janann Sherman

Rankin, Jeannette (1880–1973), pacifist, suffragist, and congresswoman.After successfully leading the suffragist movement in Montana, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress. A progressive Republican and a pacifist, Rankin joined fifty‐six other members of Congress on 4 April 1917 in voting against U.S. entry into World War I. This vote contributed to her defeat when she sought election to the U.S. Senate in 1918.

Rankin continued to work for world peace. In 1919, she served as a U.S. delegate to the Second International Congress of Women in Zurich. In 1929–39, she worked as a Washington lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War. She ran a blistering campaign against President Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy in 1940; Montana voters returned her to Congress. Still committed to pacifism, Rankin voted unsuccessfully against the Lend‐Lease Act and Agreements, the draft, the repeal of the Neutrality Acts, and increased military expenditures. Despite the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Rankin cast the sole vote against U.S. entry into World War II, the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry in both world wars. She was not reelected in 1942.

After World War II, Rankin decried the Cold War, opposed the Korean War, and denounced U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1967, a broad anti–Vietnam War coalition of pacifists, feminists, and students organized the Jeannette Rankin Brigade and urged the eighty‐eight‐year‐old Rankin to run for Congress in 1968. Ill health forced her out of the race, but she continued to speak out against the Vietnam War until her death from a heart attack in Carmel, California, on 18 May 1973.
[See also Vietnam Antiwar Movement.]

Bibliography

Hannah Josephson , First Lady in Congress: Jeannette Rankin, 1974.

Justin D. Murphy

Jeannette Rankin 1880–1973, American pacifist, b. Missoula, Mont. She was active in social work and campaigned for woman suffrage. A Republican, she was the first woman in the United States to serve (1917–19) in Congress and also was (1941–43) a member of the 77th Congress. She voted against the declaration of war on Germany in 1917 and in 1941 cast the only vote in the House against entering the war. A member of various antiwar organizations, she led (1968) the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a peace group, to Washington to protest the Vietnam War.

Bibliography: See biography by H. Josephson (1974).