Jeanette Rankin Stood Tall for her Beliefs

 

by Pa Rock

History Enthusiast

A young suffragette and peace activist from Montana by the name of Jeanette Rankin became the first woman in history to be seated in the United States Congress on this date in 1917.  She had been elected, as a Republican, the preceding November to one of two at-large House seats that had been allocated to Montana based on the relatively new state's population.  

Rep. Rankin became a member of the US House of Representatives more than three full years before women across the entire United States received the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in August of 1920.  By the time that women's suffrage (the right to vote) was granted nationwide by the Constitution, it was already in effect in several western states including more than a half century in Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870).  Rep. Rankin's own state of Montana had granted women the right to vote in 1914, two years before Rankin won her seat in Congress.  She had been an activist in the fight to get the vote for women in Montana.

Jeanette Rankin made her mark in American history by being the first female elected to Congress, but she didn't stop there.  It was as a peace activist where she truly had an impact.  The lady from Montana had been serving in the House for exactly one month when President Woodrow Wilson came before a Joint Session of Congress and gave a speech requesting a formal declaration of war against Germany.  Jeanette Rankin was one of fifty House members to vote "no" on the request to take the United States into what would become known as World War I.  (Six senators also voted "no.")

The following year the Montana legislature changed the congressional delegation selection from two at-large seats to two single district seats, and gerrymandered Rankin into a strongly Democratic district, so she chose to run for the Senate instead and lost that election decisively.  Her opposition to the entry of the US in World War I has been seen as part of the reason she lost that election.

On that vote in opposition to the US entering the war, Jeanette Rankin later said, "I felt the first time a woman had a chance to say no to war, she should say it."

In 1940 Jeanette Rankin again ran for Congress in the state of Montana and managed to win that election .  She was sworn into office on January 3rd, 1941, and during most of her first year in Congress there was a great deal of national dialogue about whether the United States should engage in the wars which were spreading around the globe.   However, public opinion on the matter was not solidified until December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  Then, of course, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went before a Joint Session of Congress  - as President Wilson had done during Jeanette Rankin's first term in Congress. - and asked for a Declaration of War against Japan.

The vote for entry into the Second World War was far more lopsided than the vote for entry into the First World War had been.   This time only one member of either chamber, the House or Senate, voted against entry into the war - and that member was Jeanette Rankin of Montana.  There were boos and hisses from the House gallery and recriminations nationwide.  Rep. Everett Dirksen of Illinois tried to get her to change her vote, or to at least abstain, but the principled congresswoman refused.  She was chased into the House cloakroom by a gaggle of reporters and took refuge in a phone booth until she could be rescued by Capitol Police.   Photos of Rankin in the phone booth ran in newspapers across the country.

Jeanette Rankin said of her second vote against going to war:  "As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else."

Her political career was over after two single terms in the US House of Representatives, but Jeanette Rankin was not finished as an activist.  She traveled extensively and visited India on multiple occasions where she studied the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.  

During the 1960's and early 1970's the indomitable Miss Rankin was out and about leading protests against US involvement in the war in Vietnam.  "The Jeanette Rankin Brigade," a coalition of women's peace groups, held an anti-war march in Washington DC, that was the largest women's demonstration in the US since the days of the suffragist movement, and Rankin herself, then in her late eighties, led a march of 5,000 women from Union Station to the Capitol Building where they presented a peace petition to the Speaker of the House.

Jeanette Rankin passed away in Carmel, California, on May 18th, 1973, at the age of ninety-two.   She has been memorialized with a statue in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol as well as in the Montana state capitol, and she has also been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

When it came to standing up for her beliefs, few have stood as tall as Jeanette Rankin.  She talked the talk and walked the walk - and never worried about mundane matters like getting re-elected!