When presidents took office in March, Congress convened in April. Among the newly elected members in 1917 was Jeannette Rankin (R-Montana), the first Congresswoman. For her, April 2 began with a victory breakfast with two hundred women at the Shoreham Hotel. Rankin sat between Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Alice Paul of the National Woman’s Party. Everyone knew the rival leaders detested each other. It was the last time they ever appeared together.
After the event, Rankin spoke from the balcony of NAWSA’s headquarters, where she would live. Her admirers then conveyed her to Capitol Hill in a motorcade of decorated cars, where Speaker Champ Clark (D-Missouri) and his wife, both avid suffragists, escorted Rankin and Catt into the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony.
NAWSA’s Carrie Chapman Catt accompanies Representative Rankin to her swearing-in.
Born near Missoula, Montana, in 1880, to prosperous ranchers, Rankin was the oldest of seven children, six girls and a boy. They all pursued professional careers. Rankin ran the ranch and trained as a social worker before becoming a NAWSA agent. Mary was an English professor and Harriet was dean of women at the state university; Edna was a lawyer. Their brother Wellington, a noted trial attorney, paid Jeannette’s bills from a family trust.
Wider roles for women reflected how Westerners valued their contributions to the region’s survival and success. So did access to jury duty, divorce reform, occasional equal pay, enthusiasm for co-education, and voting rights. By 1916, women had universal suffrage in eleven states west of the Mississippi and Illinois, which allowed presidential-only suffrage. Rankin campaigned for suffrage in fifteen states, including Montana, where it won in 1914. Two years later she ran as a Progressive Republican, supporting federal suffrage, protections for children, and “preparedness . . . for peace.” Rankin, 36, won Montana’s single seat by 7500 votes.
As a “first,” Rankin was a curiosity. The Nation described her facial features, red hair, “small figure and well-fitting garments.” Under the headline, “Congresswoman Rankin Real Girl: Likes Nice Gowns and Tidy Hair,” the Washington Post found her “thoroughly feminine,” wearing “clinging gowns” and “high . . . French heels.”
War in Europe dominated the 1916 election. President Woodrow Wilson promised to maintain America’s uneasy neutrality. In February 1917, when Germany broke its pledge to limit submarine attacks on American shipping, the United States severed diplomatic relations. Tensions escalated further with release of the Zimmerman Telegram on March 1. Deciphered by British cryptographers, it was a message from Arthur Zimmermann, Germany’s Foreign Minister, directing his ambassador in Mexico to promise that Germany would return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, in exchange for Mexico’s support.
At 8:35 PM on April 2, 1917, the President asked a joint session of Congress to declare war on Germany, because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Four days later, during a late night roll call, Rankin cast her first vote. “I want to stand by my country but I cannot vote for war. I vote no.” The New York Times described her as “weeping copiously.” Witnesses found her composed but reported several men in tears. Forty-nine other representatives and six senators voted no, but only Rankin was condemned for disloyalty and cowardice.
Her brother had urged her to cast “a man’s vote,” but she believed she had accurately represented public sentiment in Montana. Catt was furious. She had abandoned her own devotion to international peace to win Wilson’s support for suffrage. When Rankin ran for Senate in 1918, Catt campaigned for her opponent.
Peace became Rankin’s passion. In 1940 she won another term in Congress, with the backing of Montana women and labor leaders, defeating a New Deal Democrat. She opposed Lend-Lease, the draft, and military spending. The day after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war against Japan. In response to the roll call, Rankin answered, “No. As a woman I cannot go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” Hers was the only no vote.
The outcry was instant. Members and onlookers booed and hissed. After adjournment, she was mobbed and shoved. Slipping into a phone booth, she called the Capitol police, who escorted to her office and stood guard for days. Next came months of hate mail and death threats. “Montana is 110 percent against you,” her brother reported.
For the next twenty-five years, Rankin traveled extensively, studied Gandhi’s work in India, opposed the Cold War and US involvement in Korea. The war in Vietnam revived her career. In January 1968, she led an anti-war demonstration in Washington, at the head of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a random collection of pacifists, feminists, rock musicians, students, and radicals. At the end of her life, in 1973, a journalist asked if she would have made different choices. Rankin responded, “I would have been nastier,” an adjective that resonates today.
The Jeannette Rankin Peace Brigade: Rankin is the woman wearing glasses.
In 1921, Rankin was in the gallery when Congress passed the Shepherd-Towner Act. It funded clinics, midwives, and health education, primarily for rural women. She had introduced the first “baby bill,” in 1918, to combat America’s bottom-rung maternal and infant mortality rate. The only woman then serving in Congress, Mary Alice Robertson (R-Oklahoma), opposed the measure.
Nor is Rankin known for being the only woman ever to vote for woman suffrage. In January 1918 she introduced the amendment and opened debate in the House. She joined the majority to pass it, 274-136, exactly the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment. The Senate stalled for nine months, before defeating the measure. It ignored a personal appeal from Wilson, who presented his conversion to supporting suffrage as a war measure.
Ironically for Rankin, the war was a catalyst for suffrage. Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom were among twenty countries enfranchising women before the US. Many American women became soldiers before they became voters. To support the war, women worked in factories and fields, and abroad, as ambulance drivers, nurses, and telephone operators. With no standing army or weapons stockpile, telephone technology was America’s major contribution to victory. General “Black Jack” Pershing recruited bilingual women to run switchboards at the front lines. Considered members of the military, they communicated every order.
Including Rankin, 383 women have been elected or appointed to Congress since 1916. Today 126 women are 29% of the House. With twenty-five women in the Senate, the Congress is 28.2% female.
Which is not enough.
PHOTO CREDITS: Public domain, Library of Congress; O’Brien.
SOURCES:
Elisabeth Griffith, FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
Robert D. McFadden, “Ex-Rep. Jeannette Rankin Dies; First Woman in Congress, 92,” New York Times (May 20, 1973), https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0611.html
Mary Barmeyer O’Brien, Jeannette Rankin: Bright Star in the Big Sky (Twodot, 1995).
Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (Feminist Press, 1987).
Joan Hoff Wilson, “Rankin, Jeannette Pickering,” Notable American Women: The Modern Period, Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds. (Harvard Belknap Press, 1980).
Thank you for sharing such an interesting life: I had never heard of Jeanette Rankin before. I loved how she stood her ground, even when it was challenging politically. What a force she must have been - perhaps reflected in those final words, "I'd have been nastier." Wow!