Jeannette Rankin

(click to enlarge)
Jeannette Rankin, 1918. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born June 11, 1880, near Missoula, Mont., U.S. — died May 18, 1973, Carmel, Calif.) U.S. reformer, first woman member of the U.S. Congress (1917 – 19, 1941 – 43). She was a social worker and an active member of the woman suffrage movement. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916, she introduced the first bill to give women the vote. A pacifist, she voted against declaring war on Germany (1917). After losing her bid for a U.S. Senate seat (1918), she returned to social work. In 1940 she was again elected to the House, where she became the only legislator to vote against the declaration of war on Japan. Declining to seek reelection, she continued to lecture on social reform. In 1968, at age 87, she led 5,000 women, the "Jeannette Rankin Brigade," in protest of the Vietnam War.

For more information on Jeannette Rankin, visit Britannica.com.

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

Jeannette Pickering Rankin (1880-1973) was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. She served two terms, one beginning in 1917 and the other in 1941. A pacifist, she was the only congressperson to vote against both World War I and World War II. She was active in the women's suffrage movement and in peace movements throughout her life.

Jeannette Rankin was born on a ranch near Missoula, Montana Territory, on June 11, 1880. She was the eldest of seven children of Olive Pickering, an elementary school teacher, and John Rankin, a successful rancher and lumber merchant. An indifferent student, she graduated from the University of Montana in 1902 with a B.S., but spent the next eight years casting about for a satisfying vocation. She taught school briefly, apprenticed as a seamstress, learned furniture design, and became a social worker. To qualify herself for social work, she studied at the New York School of Philanthropy in 1908 and briefly practiced in Montana and Washington state. However, feeling suffocated by social work, she quit and enrolled in the University of Washington. While a student she became involved in the successful 1910 campaign for women's suffrage in Washington, which proved to be a decisive event in her life. She became a suffrage worker, which led directly to her career as a social reformer and peace advocate.

Returning to Missoula for Christmas, Rankin learned that a suffrage amendment was being introduced in the Montana legislature in the session beginning January 1911. She quickly organized the Equal Franchise Society, asked to address the legislature on suffrage, and became the first woman to speak before the Montana legislature. Although the amendment narrowly failed, Jeannette Rankin had been launched on a political career. The national suffrage leaders noticed her, and in the next five years she was constantly involved in suffrage efforts across the nation, especially after becoming a field secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She was the driving force in the victorious Montana campaign in 1914, and the experience helped her to decide to run for Congress in 1916.

First Woman Elected to Congress

Montana had two congressional seats elected at large. Rankin always maintained that this arrangement made possible what seemed impossible for a woman in 1916. In the Republican primary she captured one of the two places on the ticket, far outdistancing the seven men who ran. She carried the women's vote and seemed to be the second choice of everyone else. Running at large in the general election also favored her as she had become one of the best known figures in the state. She campaigned for national woman suffrage, prohibition, child welfare reform, tariff revision, and staying out of World War I in Europe. But before she could take her seat in Congress Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and Wilson decided to ask Congress for a declaration of war.

She took her seat in the House of Representatives on April 2, 1917, and four days later voted against war with Germany. Fifty-six other members of Congress also voted against war, but her vote spoke the loudest: she was the first woman in Congress. She had evolved a peace position during her suffrage days. The leadership of the woman suffrage movement, social work, and child welfare campaigns had many women, such as Jane Addams, who were pacifists, and they helped to shape Rankin's views. Ironically, most of her suffrage friends urged her to vote for war. Carrie Chapman Catt, head of NAWSA, feared that Rankin's vote would damage the suffrage cause by seeming to prove that women were sentimental and irresponsible.

Rankin saw herself as the women's representative, and she pressed the social feminist agenda of suffrage, equal pay, child welfare, protection of working women, birth control, infancy and maternity protection, and independent citizenship. (A 1907 law stripped citizenship from American women who married aliens.) Although she voted for a later declaration of war on Austria-Hungary and for war expenditures and Liberty Bonds, her first anti-war vote eroded her support in Montana. In addition, she sided with the miners in a bitter struggle with the Anaconda Copper Company in 1917. The company-dominated legislature then divided the state into separate congressional districts and gerrymandered Rankin's district so that it was overwhelmingly Democratic. Seeing little chance to retain her seat in the House of Representatives in 1918, she ran for the Senate instead. Losing in the Republican primary, she then ran a hopeless race in the general election on a third party ticket. After leaving Congress she was a delegate with Jane Addams and other peace activists to the 1919 Women's International Conference for Permanent Peace. Out of this came the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Rankin was named vice-chair-woman of its executive committee.

Activist for Social Reform and Peace

After her duties abroad she returned to the United States to become a field secretary for the National Consumers' League (NCL) under the direction of Florence Kelley. As such, she lobbied in Washington, D.C., for many of the reform measures that she had introduced in Congress. In 1921 she helped to bring about the passage of the Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, a bill that she had first introduced in 1918. She saw independent citizenship approved in 1922, and she worked to get the Child Labor Amendment passed in 1924. That autumn she resigned from the Consumers' League position to aid her brother's unsuccessful bid for the Senate. She could not know it, but her greatest accomplishments had all been made and her greatest frustrations were yet to come. Her energies, which had encompassed the broad range of social feminist reform, increasingly narrowed to the peace movement.

Discouraged with the militarism of Montana, she made a second home in Georgia, which she naively thought would be more receptive and responsive to her peace crusade. She organized the Georgia Peace Society in 1928 and tried to make Georgia a center of the peace effort, but she was to be sorely disappointed. She became a field secretary for the WILPF, but resigned within a year over disagreements with the national staff.

In April 1929 she became a paid lobbyist of the Women's Peace Union, a group trying to get a constitutional amendment to outlaw war, but soon resigned because of disagreements with the leadership. The National Council for the Prevention of War (NCPW) immediately engaged her as a Washington lobbyist. She remained with the NCPW from 1929 to 1939, resigning finally out of exasperation with the NCPW chairman and in disagreement with its tactics. In the 1930s she worked for the anti-war amendment, fought Navy appropriations, lobbied for U.S. adherence to the World Court, supported the neutrality laws, and whole-heartedly embraced the "devil theory of war," the view that the United States had been dragged into World War I by the "merchants of death" - the bankers and munitions makers.

Adamant Against All Wars

By the mid-1930s the guns of war had begun in China, Africa, and Spain. Rankin could see no justification for the United States to intervene in foreign wars, and she came to believe that President Franklin Roosevelt was plotting involvement. She strongly supported the America First Committee, and her passion for peace blinded her to the character of the likes of Father Charles Coughlin because he, too, opposed involvement. As the world slid into war, she concluded that lobbying efforts were ineffective, so she returned to Montana and ran for Congress in 1940.

Despite having been absent from Montana's political scene for 15 years, she won as a Republican pledged to keep America out of the war. In Congress, she fought a losing battle against military appropriations, the draft, and the war itself. This time, she stood alone, casting the only vote against the declaration of war against Japan after Pearl Harbor. She was the only person to have voted against war in 1917 and 1941, and the second time she experienced almost universal condemnation. Her political career was finished. She came to believe that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese attack.

From 1942 to 1968 she disappeared from the public's view. She travelled and tended to family affairs, but she was so forgotten that most people did not know that she was still alive. A reprise came during the Vietnam War when the leaders of the Women's Strike for Peace asked her to head the procession in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in their march on Washington. Nearly 88 years old, she marched at the head and presented the women's petitions to the House and Senate leadership. In the following years she took part in many peace demonstrations, and, having regained the public's attention, she advanced her ideas about peace, preferential presidential elections, a unicameral Congress, and representation-at-large. She died in her sleep on May 18, 1973, almost 93 years old.

Further Reading

An admiring, rather uncritical biography of Jeannette Rankin is Kevin S. Giles, Flight of the Dove: The Story of Jeannette Rankin (1980). Hannah Josephson knew Jeannette Rankin for over 20 years before publishing Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress (1974). Also see: Hope Chamberlin, A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress (1973), Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980), and an obituary in the New York Times on May 20, 1973.

• Born: June 11, 1880, Missoula, Mont.
• Political party: Republican
• Education: University of Montana at Missoula, graduated, 1902; School of Philanthropy, New York City, 1908, 1909
• Representative from Montana: 1917–19, 1941–43
• Died: May 18, 1973, Carmel, Calif.

A leader in the campaign to give women the right to vote in Montana, Jeannette Rankin in 1916 became the first woman elected to Congress. In the House of Representatives, she initially devoted herself to winning national suffrage (voting rights) for women, but her attentions were soon diverted to the war in Europe. A pacifist, Rankin joined 49 other antiwar members of the House to vote against U.S. entry into World War I in 1917. The following year she lost a bid to be elected to the Senate. Ironically, in 1940 Rankin again won a seat in the House, and she was there when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Standing firm for her beliefs against enormous pressure, she became the only member of Congress to vote against war with Japan.

Rankin never again ran for Congress but resumed her private activities on behalf of peace and women's rights. At 90, she was protesting the Vietnam War. After her death, the state of Montana sent a statue of Jeannette Rankin to the U.S. Capitol, bearing the motto “I cannot vote for war.”

See also Women in government

Sources

• Hannah Josephson, Jeannette Rankin, First Lady in Congress (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974)

(1880-1973), suffragist, pacifist, and congresswoman. Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, served two terms in the House of Representatives, in 1917-1919 and in 1941-1942. Born on a ranch near Missoula in Montana Territory, she became a restless, extraordinarily energetic person and a fighter for al truistic, demanding, and sometimes highly unpopular causes.

Rankin graduated from the University of Montana in 1902. After trying elementary schoolteaching and other occupations, she studied social work at the New York School of Philanthropy but found this profession also insufficiently rewarding. In 1910 she entered the University of Washington where she joined the state suffrage organization. For the next four years, she traveled back and forth across the continent, speaking and lobbying for women's right to vote. She was the moving force behind the organization that secured Montana women the franchise in 1914.

Two years later Rankin was elected to Congress on the Republican ticket. Soon after taking her seat she cast an anguished vote against the declaration of war on Germany, stating, "I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war." During her term she supported the federal woman suffrage amendment, measures to protect women workers, mothers, and children, and efforts to abolish prostitution near army camps. She voted for Prohibition and against the Espionage Act of 1917 and sought to end a strike in a copper field owned by the Anaconda company, the dominant political and economic power in Montana, by having the federal government nationalize the mine.

In 1918 she ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as an independent. Then, while serving as a field secretary for the National Consumers' League, she campaigned for legislation to promote maternal and child health care and to regulate the hours and wages of women workers. She served as an officer of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom during the early 1920s and, as a lobbyist for the Women's Peace Union, campaigned to outlaw war. Rankin became a part-time resident of Georgia where she founded the Georgia Peace Society in 1928. The following year she joined the National Council for the Prevention of War as its chief Washington lobbyist and field organizer.

Ten years later, Rankin left the National Council and was again elected to Congress, where she opposed conscription, Lend-Lease, and the repeal of neutrality laws. In December 1941 she cast the only vote against the declaration of war on Japan. After her term ended, she traveled between her homes in Montana and Georgia. Deeply interested in the nonviolent methods of Mohandas K. Gandhi and in the liberation of third world peoples, she made several visits to India. She captured the attention of the public for the last time in 1968 by leading the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, some five thousand feminists, pacifists, radicals, students, and others, to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the Vietnam War.

Bibliography:

Hannah G. Josephson, Jeannette Rankin, First Lady in Congress: A Biography (1974).

Author:

Ronald Schaffer

See also Suffrage.

A suffragist and pacifist (see pacifism), Rankin in 1917 became the first woman to serve in Congress. She has the distinction of being the only member of Congress to vote against American entry into both World Wars.

Jeannette 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.

Quotes:

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."

"The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition."

"I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no."

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2008)

Jeannette Rankin
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Montana's 1st and 2nd district
In office March 3, 1917 – March 4, 1919 (2nd district) January 3, 1941 – January 3, 1943 (1st district)
Preceded by	Tom Stout (1st term) Jacob Thorkelson (2nd term)
Succeeded by	Carl W. Riddick (1st term) Mike Mansfield (2nd term)
Born	11 June 1880(1880-06-11) Missoula, Montana
Died	18 May 1973 (aged 92) Carmel, California
Political party	Republican
Profession	Social worker, activist

Jeannette Pickering Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) was the first woman to be elected to the United States House of Representatives and the first female member of the Congress sometimes referred to as the Lady of the House. A lifelong pacifist, she voted against the entry of the United States into both World War I and World War II, the only member of Congress to vote against the latter. To date, she is the only woman to be elected to Congress from Montana.

Contents 1 Early life and suffrage movement 2 Congressional career 3 Post-congressional activities 4 Death and legacy 5 See also 6 Notes 7 External links

Early life and suffrage movement

Born in Missoula, Montana on June 11 1880, Rankin was the first of seven children of Canadian immigrant John Rankin, a rancher and lumber merchant, and Olive Rankin (neé Pickering), a former schoolteacher originally from New England. She attended the University of Montana and graduated in 1902 with a bachelor of science degree in biology.

In 1908, she migrated to New York City, where she started a career as a social worker. She later moved to Seattle, Washington, and then enrolled at the University of Washington, where she joined the incipient suffrage cause. She was instrumental in the cause's efforts to enable women to vote in Montana, and women gained the vote in Montana in 1914.^[1]

Congressional career

On November 7, 1916 she was elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana, becoming the first female member of Congress. The Nineteenth Amendment (which gave women the right to vote everywhere in the United States) was not ratified until 1920; therefore, during Rankin's first term in Congress (1917-1919), many women throughout the country did not have the right to vote, though they did in her home state of Montana.

On April 6, 1917, only 4 days into her term,^[2] the House voted on the resolution to enter World War I. Rankin cast one of 50^[3] votes against the resolution, earning her immediate vilification from the press. Suffrage groups canceled her speaking engagements. Despite her vote against entering the war, she devoted herself to selling Liberty Bonds and voted for the military draft. In 1918, she ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination to represent Montana in the United States Senate. She then ran an independent candidacy, which also failed. Her term as Representative ended early in 1919. For the next two decades, she worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for various causes.

In 1918, and again in 1919, she introduced legislation to provide state and federal funds for health clinics, midwife education, and visiting nurse programs in an effort to reduce the nation's infant mortality. While serving as a field secretary for the National Consumers' League, she campaigned for legislation to promote maternal and child health care. As a lobbyist, Rankin argued for passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, an infant and maternal health bill which was the first federal social welfare program created explicitly for women and children. As an effect of the bill, maternal and infant mortality rates improved significantly^{[citation needed]}. The legislation, however, was not enacted until 1921 and was repealed just eight years later.

She was founding Vice-President of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

In 1940, Rankin was again elected to Congress, this time on an anti-war platform. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she once again voted against entering a World War, the only member of Congress to do so, saying "As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else. It is not necessary. I vote NO." However she did not vote against declaring war on Germany and Italy following their declaration of war on the U.S. Instead, she voted merely Present.

By the end of her term, Rankin's antiwar stance had become so unpopular that she did not seek re-election. During the remainder of her life, she traveled to India seven times and was a devotee of Gandhian principles of non-violence and self-determination.

Post-congressional activities

An admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, Rankin led more than 5,000 women who called themselves "The Jeannette Rankin Brigade" to the United States Capitol to demonstrate their opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Coretta Scott King and Judy Collins were among the other well-known women who attended.

Death and legacy

Rankin died in Carmel, California at the age of 92 from natural causes. Rankin bequeathed her property in Watkinsville, Georgia to help "mature, unemployed women workers." This was the seed money for the Jeannette Rankin Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization that gives educational scholarships annually to low income women all across the United States. The organization has built capacity since its single $500 scholarship in 1978 to the eighty $2000 scholarships it is awarding in 2007. In 1985, a statue of her was placed in the United States Capitol's Statuary Hall. A play based on the life of Rankin entitled A Single Woman was produced in 2004, and a film of the same name was made in 2008.

See also

• Women in the United States House of Representatives
• WILPF

Notes

1. ^ "Jeannette Rankin (1880 - 1973)". U·X·L Biographies. U·X·l. 1996. http://www.history.com/minisites/womenhist/viewPage?pageId=924. Retrieved 2008-04-07. 
2. ^ Women in the United States Congress-1917-2005
3. ^ Senate article on Rankin

External links

• Jeannette Rankin at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Women in Congress Biography
• Suffragists Oral History Project at Berkeley - 1971-72 interviews with Rankin
• Jeannette Rankin Foundation
• Jeannette Rankin Peace Center
• Peace is a Woman's Job, play and film about Rankin by actor/playwright, Allyson Adams
• A Single Woman, a film about Rankin by actor/playwright, Jeanmarie Simpson
• Jeannette Rankin at Find a Grave

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jeannette Rankin

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by Tom Stout	United States Representative for the 2nd Congressional District of Montana 1917–1919	Succeeded by Carl W. Riddick
Preceded by Jacob Thorkelson	United States Representative for the 1st Congressional District of Montana 1941–1943	Succeeded by Mike Mansfield

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