APRIL 2, 1917: JEANNETTE RANKIN

This essay, now amended, first appeared on April 2, 2024.

When presidents took office in March, Congress convened in April. Among the newly elected members in spring 1917 was Jeannette Rankin (R-Montana), the first Congresswoman. For her, April 2 began at 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 would appear together.

Next, Rankin spoke from the balcony of NAWSA’s headquarters, a twenty-six room mansion on Rhode Island Avenue, where she would live. Her admirers then conveyed her to Capitol Hill in a motorcade of decorated cars. Speaker Champ Clark (D-Missouri) and his wife, both avid suffragists, escorted Rankin and Catt into the Capitol for her swearing-in ceremony. House members gave her a standing ovation. The New York Sun reported that Rankin would use a public bathroom, until a woman’s restroom was constructed closer to the House chamber.

Catt & Rankin standing

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. A 1902 graduate of the University of Montana, Rankin ran the ranch and trained as a social worker in New York before becoming a NAWSA field 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 expenses from a family trust and ran her campaign.

Rankin family c. 1895: Front row: John, Mary, Edna, Grace, Wellington & Olive; Back row: Jeannette, Harriet and photograph of Philena, who died. (Montana Historical Society)

Wider roles for women reflected how Westerners valued their contributions to the region’s survival and success. So did enthusiasm for co-education, access to jury duty, divorce reform and voting rights. By 1916, women had universal suffrage in eleven states west of the Mississippi. Illinois allowed presidential-only suffrage. Rankin had campaigned for suffrage in fifteen states, including Montana, where it won in 1914.

Two years later she ran for Congress as a Progressive Republican, supporting federal suffrage, protections for children, an eight-hour workday and “preparedness . . . for peace.” Rankin, thirty-six and unmarried, won Montana’s single seat by 7,567 votes. Democratic women split their tickets between President Wilson and Rankin. Her opponent in the primary, Jacob Crull, humiliated by being defeated by a woman, committed suicide the day she arrived in DC.

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.” “I am glad glad glad,” a newspaperwoman declared, “that Jeannette is not ‘freakish’ or ‘mannish’ or ‘standoffish’ or ‘shrewish’ or of any type likely to antagonize . . . gentlemen.” Catt regretted Rankin was not “an intellectual” with a law degree.

War in Europe dominated the 1916 election. 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 Mexican support.

On April 2, 1917, 8:35 pm, the President asked a joint session of Congress to declare war on Germany, because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Two 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.”

Six Senators and fifty representatives voted no: thirty-two Republicans including Rankin, sixteen Democrats, one Socialist and one independent. The New York Times wrongly described her as “on the verge of a breakdown . . . weeping copiously.” A California colleague seated “an arm’s length away” denied the report. Rankin did break protocol by explaining her vote, rather than answering with a monosyllable.

Her brother had urged her to cast “a man’s vote,” but Rankin believed she was accurately representing public sentiment in Montana. Catt was furious. She had suppressed her own devotion to international peace to win Wilson’s support for suffrage. Both parties campaigned against the outliers. Redistricted in 1918, Rankin ran for Senate. She lost the GOP primary by less than 2,000 votes, ran on the National Woman’s Party ticket and lost decisively.

Ironically, the war was a catalyst for suffrage. Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom were among twenty countries enfranchising women before the US. To support the war, women worked in factories and fields at home and as ambulance drivers, nurses, and telephone operators overseas. 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.

Rankin was 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; ignored a personal appeal from Wilson, who presented his conversion to supporting suffrage as a war measure; and defeated it. There were no women in Congress when both houses passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.

Congresswoman Rankin with the flag flown over the Capitol on the day of her pro-suffrage vote

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 dire maternal and infant mortality rate, the worst among twenty nations. The only woman then serving in Congress, Mary Alice Robertson (R-Oklahoma), opposed the measure.

In 1940 Rankin won another term in Congress, age sixty-six, 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.

Peace became Rankin’s passion. For the next twenty-five years, Rankin traveled extensively, studied Gandhi’s work in India and opposed US involvement in Korea. The war in Vietnam revived her pacifism. 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, moms and radicals.

The Jeannette Rankin Peace Brigade: Rankin is the woman wearing glasses.

In 1971, at age ninety-one, she appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show,” sharing the spotlight with silent film star Gloria Swanson. In response to Cavett asking, “Would you say . . . men have . . . botched things up?” Rankin replied, “Men have done very well, considering they worked all on their own, and never took the help of women.” Two years later, at the end of her life, a journalist asked if she would have made different choices. “This time,” Rankin responded, “I’d be nastier,” an adjective that resonates today.

SOURCES:

Photo credits: Public domain unless noted; Library of Congress, Montana Historical Society

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).

Kate Walbert, “Has Anything Changed for Female Politicians,” The New Yorker (August 16, 2016), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/has-anything-changed-for-female-politicians

Joan Hoff Wilson, “Rankin, Jeannette Pickering,” Notable American Women: The Modern Period, Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds. (Harvard Belknap Press, 1980).

Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (Feminist Press, 1987).

Elisabeth Griffith, FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).